The mainboard of the vertex printer sadly has no aux ports like the ramps does,
also all 4 of the uart’s on the ATmega2560 are in use, so i had to hack the board a little.
First I added pin headers to the cn2 port to get my power from.
left pin is 3.3v right pin is ground the middle 2 pins are rx and tx.
I took the code from a git project (ESP8266-transparent-bridge)
and modded it for use with my vertex printer.
i set the uart speed to 500000 on both marlin firmware and on the esp module. https://github.com/UnicronNL/ESP8266-transparent-bridge
I hooked it all up to the printer and after many software tweaking and flashing it works!!!
I am not happy with the solution yet, the printing does not work correct yet,
getting retry errors and after a while the printer will not respond anymore.
I tried to lower the uart speed in the esp8266 to 250000 but it does not work, seems esp uses strange uart divide and i can not get the values between 115200 and 500000 to work.
But also if i set the vertex firmware to 115200 i can not get a connection with repetier to the printer.
My opinion is that this feature should have been there already from the beginning, at least a connection with a network cable.
Maybe Velleman can support with knowledge on recommended baudrate?
I do not think velleman can help with the baud settings of the esp8266…
but i have made some progress and met some other challenges.
I have disabled the “debug” messages the esp sends to the uart port,
also i have set the rx and tx ports to other pins on the esp8266 gpio13 and gpio15, so now there is
no information going to the printer other than the repetier commands.
but a problem is that when i connect the alternate tx pin the esp8266 does not boot so i can only connect it after boot.
Also i set the “receive cache size” to 63 in repetier and now i can print an object without the printer stalling out.
I still receive some “resend” messages while printing but it does not mess with the print quality.
(comparison between usb print and wifi print) 0.2 mm 50 % infill.
