It’s obvious, isn’t it?
Is your network on 2.4 or 5 GHz band? My Sovol printers (SV07 Plus & SV08 MAX) only work with 2.4GHz.
How do you know the printer is not connecting? Did you use the “Show IP / Advanced” menu option to see if it received an IP from the router?
If your router offers both bands, make sure either the computer you are using is on the same band or that the two bands are bridged in the router and the firewall allows local devices to communicate with each other via wifi.
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@torch
The Zero & SV08 use a WI-FI text file.
It only works with WPA or WPA2, new router & upgrades are on WPA3.
Unless the router is in WPA3/WPA2 mode. In this case, there is backward compatibility with WPA2.
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Since you don’t have cameras on each, only 15 devices runnning a text streaming on network to a single PC is nothing of a load for wifi. Also since you DO NOT want direct internet access to the printers, you can connect them to there own access point thats middle of the farm and use ethernet only to PC.
A lot of people have issues keeping neptunes going, so highly don’t advise that, but consider if labor expense of bedslingers actaully outweighs purchase cost of less faster CoreXY machines, especally if you increase in scale in future.
Welcome to the Sovol Forum, SheepInACart.
My Neptune 4 Pro has been mostly reliable. It’s a fairly simple bed slinger design. The only problem I’ve had was soon after I bought it, with TPU not fully constrained in the extruder path, sending spaghetti into the extruder body and breaking the plastic housing that contains the axis pivot for the extruder idler gear. I’m now careful when feeding TPU and all has been OK since then.
If I bought SV06 ACE printers for a small print farm, I’d want to add cameras so I can remotely monitor the printers so I”d need some local area network bandwidth for any printers I’d buy.
I’ve pretty much decided on using the the Sovol Zero. It has a very robust coreXY platform for precise printing and reliability. It already has a camera and an Ethernet port so there is no need to spend time or money adding those, although I will add LED lighting so the camera works better.
The Zero is small, and that’s good and bad. The small coreXY format doesn’t use much space, and even less compared to a bed slinger on the basis of print area per printer footprint area. I can pack a lot of 3D printing into a small space. The Zero’s smaller 150x150x150 mm build volume limits what can be printed but I make small products. The Zero can make 2, 4 and 9 of the different products at once… two to five times per day, so throughput is good with a reasonable number of job setups.
I’ve also experimented with continuous printing where I print on the front of the build plate and use the print head to push parts out the front door before starting another part. That trick doesn’t work with every part, but it works on most of my parts and it’s pretty slick. The trick is designing a brim that prints with the part and detaches with it, and managing ooze before and after the print so it also leaves with the ejected part so each new part starts with a clean build plate. I’ve had good success continuously printing some of the parts I manufacture. When they go into production, I can start a job and have a kilogram of parts in the bin in front of the printer a couple of days later. Swap to a new reel of filament and start the job again.
I have a local area network with my three office printers isolated from the internet on an 8 port switch. I have a 24 port switch that I can use for the print farm to network those printers but keep them off the internet. I program the 5G gateway router to recognize each 3D printer’s MAC address and not allow it internet access. The 3D printers are connected to the gateway’s two Ethernet ports via the two network switches. I no longer have any of my 3D printers on the WiFi network.
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Thanks for the good technical advice, torch.
My WiFi gateway has 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. The Sovol printers may be trying unsuccessfully to connect to the 5 GHz WiFi network. This is probably a problem I could solve by programming the 5G WiFi gateway to only use 2.4 GHz, but I didn’t look into that too much. It may work but the Sovol printers might not like the gateway’s security implementation and there is nothing I can do about that. Even if it worked, it seems like a fragile fix. If I need to replace the gateway, I’d be starting over trying to network everything again.
I found it to be much easier to connect the 3D printers via Ethernet, through a switch, and into the Ethernet ports on the gateway. That’s a more robust and simpler solution. It’s also more secure and doesn’t degrade the WiFi network used by the computers and tablets. I programmed the 5G gateway to deny each 3D printer access to the internet based on its MAC address. The cables are a bit messy and old fashioned but it’s a simple and reliable network solution.
Sovol printers can’t even see a 5GHz band. No 5GHz radio. Depending on how you’ve configured things the 5GHz and 2.4GHz may be isolated from each other, even if they have the same name. That could be an issue if your computer is on 5GHz and the printer on 2.4.
But if you are happy with wires then it’s a moot point.
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