3D Printing From Phones Without Using Computer

In the name of ALLAH

God willing, we will learn in this lesson how to use smart phones to 3d printing, from design to printing, without having to use a computer ,whatever printer possibilities

Why print using the phone?

1. In the case of light prints the and not wanting to use a computer

After learning the way you will be able to upload a design that you like and connect the printer to the phone and enjoy printing without access to a computer and a lot of complications

2. If you use cloud printing

It is a service enable you to connect the printer to the Internet and then control the printer from anywhere in the world and from any device

The method

We all know that the printing steps are design - formation G code - the actual printing process

We will use some free applications and services to perform these steps and then connect the printer to the phone via usb cable and start printing

Step 1: Get the Design and Prepare for Printing

Of course, you can download the design that you want from the Internet, provided that the format stl

Among the most famous sites to download those files thingiverse site

and also you can download application from here

After downloading the design , download Graphite application to view the file and do some adjustments to the size and rotation then save

You can also use our online stl files viewer tool from here

Step 2: Formation of G Code

Currently there is no effective applications to convert the file to the G code so will we use a cloud service that lets you form the G code from a web browser which is a very efficient service where you can upload the file you want to convert and choose print settings and wait for a few seconds until the conversion then download G code directly

Among the most famous sites that offer this service Astroprint, Makeprintable

We will use Astroprint because it is the most comprehensive, but Makeprintable specialized in fixing files and formatted it for printing

Log in to the site and register and then a comprehensive and very beautiful control panle will appear

From the control panel, press the Add Printer to adjust printer settings such as hot surface and surface size and temperature

Then press upload file and wait until the load

You will see the file ,then select the printer ,material and then choose Print Settings from the bottom

Settings menu will appear adjust as you like by design and the required quality and speed

This service is used slic3r or cura program to form the G code and you can choose between them

The beauty of this service is that there is z offset option to control the printing surface level

Click on the slice to begin in the formation of the G code and then download

There are a lot of programs viewing of G code files which is useful to know how the printing process and possible errors

The most famous of these programs and graphite , gcodesimulator

Step 3: The Actual Printing Process

There are two applications wonderful to connect the phone directly to the printer in several ways and are fox3d , gcodesimulatorprinter

We will use this lesson fox3d program because it is also free and excellent

Open the program and press settings to choose the method of connection The program supports connection via usb cable or Bluetooth or wifi

We choose usb because it is available in all printers, but phone must support otg cable ,connect otg to phone and connect the printer and then press connect and wait until the connection is made

press prepare to configure the printer , program is similar to pronterface in computer where you can control nozzle heat and moving the axes and inject some plastic to ensure the nozzle works welll and show strength of the raw material

So that the program recognizes the G code file must be in the path of 3dfox in the phone's memory

To speed up the process and make sure to upload G code properly, we take the memory card from the printer and install it into the phone and copy the G code file and installed it back in the printer

go to the print screen and then choose to print ,then print from the sd , chose desired file and then press print