Can I control my printer with my smartphone?

Okay, that's not the WHOLE question, because it leaves up to interpretation what is meant by "control."

You see, I had this thought: I need a computer (Arduino) to run a controller (RAMPS) which is also a computer just with drivers added. The drivers are, well, computers. Yes, I am aware that there are orders of magnitude difference in their complexity and what they can each do, but really, there are 3 layers of processing and communication going on here.

So then I thought, I have a surplus of processors. While I have a closet full of XP and Win7 from my IT days, I also have a drawer full of old cell phones, some of which are smart phones. They have powerful processors, full-color touch screen interface, 2 high-speed and low-light cameras, bilt-in WiFi and Bluetooth,and with enough memory they could probably handle the slicing, too. So, could a smartphone become the brain for a 3D printer?

I know the answer is yes, but I'm not really that technical. I'm an artist who happens to have been in IT to pay for my habit. I've also built two printers of my own, so I'm a little technical, just not enough for this. Could a power supply and drivers be added to a cell phone that has been rooted and loaded with appropriate software to run a 3D printer? Many phones are recycled or thrown out, so it might be a cheaper resource than even Arduinos are.

Feel free to tell me I'm nutz. I don't see this idea posted anywhere else, but I only tried a half-dozen searches first.

You´re nutz!

Processing power isn´t the only thing needed, but also lot´s of I/O pins ( digital and analog )
No smartphone would have unused I/O pins, because they are tailored for their purpose ( I may be wrong here )
If they had unused I/O pins, how would you connect them?
Your best bet is a RasPI or BeagleBone to work as a computer for 3D printers. But for creating your own 3D objects, you´d want a faster CPU with big screen and OpenSCAD or other SW.
-Olaf

You can get signals in and out of a surplus cell phone via wifi, bluetooth, or the USB port, if it has one, so you need an interface board in the printer that can work with one or more of those.

I don't think the phone CPUs have the processing muscle, and I know that they don't have the memory required to slice anything but very simple files in any reasonable amount of time, if there was a slicer that would run in a phone OS.

What would be the point of doing this, other than to say that you can?

FDM printing by itself is unreliable enough without adding the vagaries of wireless networking or bluetooth. I don't even trust a computer connected with a USB cable and do my printing from SD cards...

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

The RAMPS board is completely self sufficient for running your printer if you add an SD card. Just load the gcode you want to print, renamed as needed by your firmware for the board to execute as soon as it starts up. Adding an LCD in addition to the SD card will allow you to select from numerous gcode files on the card and allow you to tweak the printer as it prints.

Replacing your RAMPS board with a phone is not possible without tearing the phone apart to access I/O pins for controlling the motors, reading the sensors, and powering the hotend. If anything, the phone would only be replacing the Arduino Mega board, you would still need a RAMPS like board for converting the output from the phone into electrical signals that can be interpreted by the hardware. The Arduino is really the only computer in the RAMPS board. The RAMPS shield itself just makes the I/O pins from the Arduino accessible in a useful layout while the motor drivers convert the signals from the board into on and off sequences for the motors power.

Considering you would need to create your own RAMPS-like shield for your phone as well as firmware for running the printer, you might be better off looking into something like a Duet board which runs its own web interface in addition to running the printer. This would theoretically allow you to control your printer via your phone. A better use for old cell phones might be as brains for robots or an interface for home automation.

You can have another board host the usb connection to the Ramps and communicate with that.

I have heard of octoprint and rasperry pi

A smartphone can be used as the user interface for a 3D printer, but as has already been said, it doesn't have the I/O pins needed to drive the hardware. Neither does it run a real time operating system, and that would make it hard to implement the movement control software.

I do use a smartphone to control my printer sometimes. The printer uses a Duet controller board and I have the board's Ethernet port connected to my home network, so my phone accesses it via WiFi. I still use a PC for slicing. In principle a phone app could do slicing, but it probably makes more sense to use a cloud based slicing service if you want to avoid needing a PC.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

Quote
the_digital_dentist
What would be the point of doing this, other than to say that you can?

Hah! It seem that would be the only reason to do it!

I was just thinking that so many phones are thrown away simply because they are old or contracts expired that they might be a "free" computing resource. It would seem that the extra problems introduced would have the opposite result instead. A RAMPS-like board that takes in power and mounts drivers would still be required at a minimum, and that board would have to be redesigned with every model of phone driving up the cost, not down. That might also extend to the firmware, though I think that at that point the phone could be rooted with Linux and side-step the firmware issue. I leaned everything I know about programming from Hackers, though.

It's not something I would even consider attempting, myself. It would be a fun graduate project someday, though.

Many people, including myself, already (partially) control a 3d printer with a smartphone.

Alas, the current systems are all quirky and filled with unnecessary limitations and unnecessary complexity.
Please help us make Reproid better. ( Reproid [reprap.org] )

Controlling a printer with a cell phone is limited by the cell phone's I/O bottleneck.
The only I/O available on a typical cell phone is the audio jack, wifi, bluetooth, SD card slot, and a USB port.
All of them require some sort of hardware adapter to convert the cell phone I/O to something usable by the rest of the printer.
Each one of those interfaces is used by some project or another that uses a cell phone to control a 3d printer:

* audio jack: Hot Rod ROBO [reprap.org]
* Wifi: OctoPrint, AstroBox, etc. [reprap.org] [www.adafruit.com]
* bluetooth: Android-Bluetooth-Reprap, SAV MKI, etc. [reprap.org] [reprap.org]
* SD card slot: RAMPS and many other controller boards [reprap.org] [reprap.org] [reprap.org]
* USB port: GCodePrintr, etc. [reprap.org]

When you can change filament, prep the print bed, and remove the finished print via remote access I'll be more interested. Until then it's just a "gee-whiz, look what I can do" type of thing with little practical value and an extra complication that introduces many new failure modes.

Meh.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

The RAMPS has no own intelligence at all, it is just a carrier board (shield) for the external components needed. The brain is the Atmega processor on the Arduino. Calling a stepper driver a computer is a bit far fetched.
As for using cellphones, all the current 32 bit controller boards are using processors that are close relatives to what is built into smartphones.
The reason why they are not used for slicing isn't that they wouldn't be capable of it, but that they have to run as real time controllers, which conflicts with running an OS like Linux or similar.
There are a couple of mini computer boards out there that have two processors, one for real time control and one to run Linux on, but i haven't seen them used for printers yet.
Splitting the two tasks up makes a lot of sense, since each on it's own can be done very cheaply and you don't have a common point of failure.

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