Smith | Allen is a design firm based in Oakland, California. The firm says that "its work has an interdisciplinary approach, bringing design, innovation, and novel concepts to a wide range of projects."
Smith | Allen points out that:
"3D printers have come a long way in the last two years. It used to be the norm to be tethered to your printer and dedicate a computer just to run your print jobs or, even worse, use SD cards to connect your printers to the network. Now that we're building our facilities at scale, we need our printers to be running 24/7. This means we need maximum reliability, and we can't just swap USB cables and SD cards."
Some of the newer printers, such as the Series 1 Type A machines, have built-in networking and Wi-Fi that solve this problem. This is possible thanks to an open-source project called OctoPrint. OctoPrint manages all of your printer's communication, enabling independent Wi-Fi printing. OctoPrint runs on the immensely popular Raspberry Pi, and with its new Model B+, it's simple and surprisingly inexpensive to add Wi-Fi to your 3D printer.
The article on Instructables.com then provides step-by-step illustrated instructions for carrying out this project.
