Map Drive or FTP into Duet

Is it possible to connect via a mapped drive or FTP so I can copy files to SD card without removing it?

I have been trying to do this but cant get a connection.

Rob.

Hello Rob, I think the only way to Upload files is via DC42s Firmware and Web interface, I was running FireFox for the connection, but this didn't allow me to Delete Gcode files...
So I now have an installation of Chrome (which I don't like to be honest), that solely does the printer, and it works amazingly well.
A credit to DCs hard work I think.
Kim

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Please send me a PM if you have suggestions, or problems with Big Blue 360.
I won't see comments in threads, as I move around to much.
Working Link to Big Blue 360 Complete

Rob, the firmware doesn't support FTP or direct access to the SD card. I'm working on the firmware to allow any files to be uploaded to anywhere on the SD card, but it will still use HTML. The current upload speed is about 2.2Mb/min but I hope to increase that.

Kim, I've got delete working under Firefox.

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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].

We have a long-term plan to add support for mounting the SD card (in the Duet) as a USB mass storage device on the desktop, when connected via USB. But haven't got around to it yet! There is a problem of the speed the firmware can write to the SD card; I don't know enough about programming to know where the problem is. There is a library that supports USB Mass storage devices on Arduino, but I'm not sure if we're using it at the moment, or something else.

Ian
RepRapPro tech support

Quote
droftarts
We have a long-term plan to add support for mounting the SD card (in the Duet) as a USB mass storage device on the desktop, when connected via USB.

That's nice for those who use USB as their primary method of controlling the Duet, but doesn't help those of us who use the web interface. I now have a build of the firmware that can upload all the web interface files via the web interface, which is OK as long as you already have working web interface files on the SD card in the first place (not always the case during development!). I've got the speed up to almost 4Mb/min, which is fine for web interface files, but a little slow for large gcode files e.g. 2min30 for a 10Mb file.

I found some code that supports an FTP server on top of lwip, so if I ever find time then I may try integrating that.

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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].

You know I'm not too au fait with the inner workings of the firmware, but I thought the problem wasn't the speed of the interface, ie ethernet or USB, more the way the Due/Duet writes to the SD card? I don't know how Adrian implemented writing to the SD card. See this link: [asf.atmel.com] . It would seem to allow mounting of the storage device attached to the Arduino on a host system via USB? What I was trying to suggest was that looking at this (which may already be in the firmware) might allow for faster writes to the SD card, via any means of transfer. There seems to have been some work done on this already: [www.circuitsathome.com] . Feel free to tell me to shut up if this isn't at all relevant.

It's the sort of thing I'd love to suggest offering a bounty for: [forums.reprap.org] . At least it might be a way we could get to pay dc for his work...

Ian
RepRapPro tech support

Quote
droftarts
You know I'm not too au fait with the inner workings of the firmware, but I thought the problem wasn't the speed of the interface, ie ethernet or USB, more the way the Due/Duet writes to the SD card?

While working on firmware 0.57b I did some tests to see where the bottleneck lay. I modified the web server code so that during a file upload it just discarded the data instead of writing it to SD card. The time taken to send a 10Mb file was 3m17s if the data was written to SD card, and 2m49s if the data was discarded. Not a huge amount of difference. [I've improved the speed somewhat since then.] My tests also revealed that even when the data was not discarded, every time a data packet was received, the firmware reported that it had the maximum free buffer space available, indicating that it had already written all the data received in the previous packet.

So I concluded that although the way the firmware writes data to the SD card is not very efficient, it isn't the limiting factor.

I think I can probably improve the file upload speed to 5Mb/min or a little more by refactoring the web interface code as a state machine, and perhaps making the writing to SD card more efficient. To get much higher speeds, I think a different protocol will be needed, e.g. FTP.

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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].