Good day, forum!
Few days ago become happy owner of Sovol Zero, and ready to share some tips i came thru.
First, as all figured out already, that M3x16 screw for filament sensor a really short. Without shim it possible to attach it, but as i understood main point of mounting was to have sensor moving freely in all dimensions. So M3x20 really a help here.
Second. I tried to boot with ‘wifi.cfg’ file for something like 10+ reboots.. And no chances. Watched youtubes - few peoples have issues but on 3+ reboot it works for them.
So i wired it up by ethernet, and goes to SSH.
Found a bunch of created wifi profiles (duplicates with suffixes) in NetworkManager folder, so it seems script that read wifi.cfg are working. I have a MikroTik hAP ax3 with custom Mesh configuration, maybe it need more tweaks.
Here in config i changed key-mgmt process to WPA (i got WPA2-PSK in router).
And after few more forums i found this block that need to be added to NetworkManager config:
I can’t get WiFi to work with my SV08 or my Zero, so I use a WiFi bridge plugged into the printer’s Ethernet port. I hope Sovol doesn’t start making printers without an Ethernet port. If I had a larger print farm, I’d probably run an Ethernet cable from my 5G router to the farm and use a 24 port switch to run Ethernet to all of the printers. WiFi is handy but it still isn’t as stable and reliable as a wired LAN connection.
I do hope that Sovol is reading this forum and uses the information provided above by @neraveran to make WiFi work out of the box for a larger percentage of their customers. I’m 0 for 2 on WiFi on my Sovol printers and I was too lazy to make WiFi work when I could just plug in a WiFi bridge.
It would be interesting to poll users of the Sovol forum, presumably a bit more tech savvy and motivated than the average Sovol customer, to see what percentage had WiFi work without problems, were able to get it working with a little effort, were able to get it working with quite a bit of effort, or gave up and use Ethernet or transfer files on a thumb drive.
From comments I’ve seen under YouTube videos, I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half of the Sovol printers that nominally have WiFi aren’t using WiFi because it doesn’t work. There is definitely room for Sovol to work on the problem to improve their customers’ user experience.
Well, lets try debug a little bit then?) Less cables to 3dPrinter is better, i think.
I tried to find all commands that i used to make it work, but they missed in bash history somehow. I was checking both wifi configuration ways, /etc/network/interfaces manual configuration, and then some iwconfig settings, and more, but main one that works is NetworkManager.
I had here a tons of duplicates of MyWiFi connection. Removed them as files from /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ and then edited config itself, as mentioned in first message.
One point i forget, after i edited connection - i launched actual connection process. Dont know does NetworkManager do it automatically or really need to enable manually, but this command:
Alright, I found my issue.
My WiFi Analyzer app shows my network as WPA2, but Google Home shows it as WPA3.
I turned off WPA3 & SSHed in & got WiFi working on the Zero…
but then I got a notification that my outside cameras were down, also my Google Hub was offline.
I turned WPA3 back on & everything came back online.
So it looks like I can’t use WiFi on the Zero or I loose connections to other things in my house.
Camera and Hub are more important, that for sure.
I dont encounter WPA3 previously, but found a forum post about configuring NetworkManager with it → WPA3 with Ubuntu. As they noted: “The WPA3 standard replaces the Pre-Shared Key exchange with Simultaneous Authentication of Equals” (SAE) per Wikipedia.
So part of editing connection file in my first post need to be extended with:
their is something about how the printer’s Debian back end is programmed. some networks just seam to not handle the connections hand shake right. i final got my printer connected to my WiFi but only though the IOT sub version SSID. OrcaSlicer 2.3.1-dev also doesn’t like the setup i have to manually connect with the ip address in a separate web browser.
nmtui-connect is the easiest way to quickly check networks function. its the terminal UI option for network manger.
The Debian version is for some reason 11 (bullseye) instead of the current 12 (bookworm) so that’s likely also going to limit what the wifi stack can do compared to what it could do if a more recent version would be in use. I also get a feeling that the OS setup is rather half-complete anyway since the kernel has debug level logging enabled and usb-storage is in debug mode too. The later has the annoying effect of flooding the logs with debug prints whenever a usb stick is attached. The software setup is also a little bit strange as some things have been properly setup with systemd, at least one is stuck in a restart loop and at the same time the startup is running with a set of scripts initiated from /etc/rc.local.
It looks like Sovol is currently working on something wifi related as the latest firmwares (1.4.6 (avoid, zoffset is wrong) and 1.4.7) bring in a new version of the wifi driver (which does overwrite the previous one without backup). It may possibly fix some connectivity issues some have been having. The script implementation for reading the wifi ssid and password from the usb file has also been rewritten in a way that looks more fault tolerant than previously.
Additional, there’s also a new “wifi service” which gets installed and started. Looking at the implementation, it allows controlling the wifi configuration with (unauthenticated) http calls but there’s nothing included using these new api endpoints yet so possibly that’s something later firmware will bring in.