Wireless on Duet 3 6HC without SBC?
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Hey everyone. Just a random question that maybe someone could answer and/or point me in the right direction, or flat out tell me NO. I'm okay with that too.
I have a 6HC that I removed from my small cartesian printer which suffered a catastrophic failure with the heat bed. I am planning to rebuild but was going to apply some better engineering principals to how I'm proceeding. One area I was curious about is the network connection. I'd like to have wifi on the 6HC but don't necessarily want/need the extras that come with running on an SBC. Plus the available space is at a premium.
I was wondering if it's possible to have wifi on the 6HC natively (similar to the Duet 3 5+). Looking at the schematics for the 5+ I see that the wifi interface is done via ESP module. My question is whether it's possible to accomplish this with the SBC interface on the 6CH if I were to adapt an ESP module to plug into that connector.
Sure, I could just buy a 5+ but I already have the hardware, and actually already have an ESP module that I was playing with (same one that's in the 5+ actually).
Thoughts?
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@th0mpy you would need to two IO ports to communicate with the ESP module as well as SPI, to handle programming the ESP and getting status back from it. You would need to build your own firmware. The first prototype Duet3 (version 0.3) had built-in WiFi, so it is certainly possible.
Here is and extract from the schematic of the Duet 0.3. You will see that as well as the SPI signals, it also needs the SAM_TFR_READY and ESP_DATA_RDY signals. The 74HC74 chip is no longer needed if you use a recent version of DuetWiFiServer, you can connect SAM_TFR_RDY to GPIO4. The SAM_TFR_READY signal could use the DATA_RDY signal on the SPI connector, however you would still need to feed the ESP_DATA_RDY signal into an IOx_IN pin, and use a UART-capable IO connector for the UART pins. You would also need to connect a IOx_OUT pin to ESP_RST.
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If you didn't want to do a permanent change to the board you could use a small external wifi to ethernet bridge device like this: https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/wifi-router/tl-wr802n/v1/
