Description
Some printers' boards, such as for instance the Creality Ender 2, don't have RX/TX GPIOs for serial communication, which means this project cannot be used with them. As these are mostly inexpensive printers, using OctoPrint with more expensive hardware is annoying due to the price.
The printers however mostly have USB sockets which can be used for serial communication. Therefore the question is: can an ESP board communicate via USB with those?
My hope is there's a USB-to-serial sort of adapter that provides a USB host and translates the USB stuff into raw serial again. The cheap UART adapters you can find online are functionally equivalent to the stuff in the printer board, they lack the host feature and cannot be used.
I know some Mega2560 based Arduino boards can provide a USB host feature and might do the translation, however they're quite bulky and also expensive. It might be cheaper to get something like an Orange Pi or so and try to run OctoPrint on there (UI won't run very well, I hope there will be a completely headless version in the future).
Perhaps there's a kind of USB host chip to do the translation which doesn't require a complex circuit that needs to be soldered on a PCB, as most people don't have access to the tools to realize that.
Activity