Ok, so after s full four day weekend of tinkering with the astroprint and the tronxy xs5a pro printer, it works! Took a full day to twerk the firmware around a bit, and various options powering up and gaining access to to astrobox and firmware while running to configure network connection. It absolutely would not accept the dongle for hot spot access to configure the settings. Wouldn’t communicate with the router at all, hell, northern system would even recognize each other. Even though I can confirm they both were actively sending wifi.lastly hardwired into the router through the ethernet.still refused to communicate. Through all of this I’m continuously in between, putting the SD boot card on my laptop and going through all the lines of code and so not see a damn thing wrong, anywhere. I’ll on accession, have difficulty getting two different systems to get along, but damn nothing line this at the end of the night, I cycled the power on the pi, reboot the printer, but didn’t connect it to the pi, powered up on the pi while connected to the network ethernet. Crawled into bed and was checking emails and decided to run one last lan scan on the network, and,… We’ll no shi_… There it was all pretty type face showing Astorbox-6765! WTF! Next morning I tweeted the code to accept ssh access and control through the network. Looked over everything, all looked fine. So, either I tweeted something and just don’t recall, or tweeted it by accident, or more likely, I think the coding is laid out in such a way, that it’s a single step at a time setup process is, required item, create sd image, (important) initial power up needs to be done with only the wifi dongle attached, AND nothing else. When network setup is complete and you have verified it’s connection, then move on to the next step. Whole day and a half repeating all the try to get it to recognize and communicate with my printer. Called it a night. Next day, disconnected everything, powered up pi, when bootloader is finished, then reverified network connection, waited. Then I powered on the printer, let it boot, then connected to the pi, still nothing but, this time for some reason, something nagging at to do nothing but a restart of the pi. Everything still connected and powered. I did, and no shi_ it all powered up as supposed, network connected through the wifi as supposed to, recognize and communicated with the printer as supposed to! I’m almost certain that each step needed to addressed one step at a time and verifying as you go. Don’t try get everything connected all at once and expect the astroprint firmware to work as intended. The following step requires certain information it accuired from the previous step, and bootloader will not go on when missing any info. Next day, I had experienced a bit initial setup issues with the interface software, both the phone app and the desktop app. One, you can not try and setup both phone and desktop apps at same. It’ll automatically kick one or the other continuously.took me a bit to finally realize that. First setup, and initial setup if user settings and connection settings, printer settings and use setup, was so much easier to do with the desktop app with the pi connected through the ethernet. That in of itself eliminates all the headaches from the past two days with the exception of the wifi dongle for hotspot setup. Still don’t know why that didn’t work, but if to do all over, screw the dongle. After all was done setting everything up through the desktop app, went back to the phone, and setup all the se same settings on it. That finished off day three. The fourth day spent messing around with the user interface and we’ll it worked or didn’t work with my xs5a pro. After reading others reviews with their tronxys, I was bit concerned. A lot of the complaint with most of them was the lack of complete remote user control with the tronxy due specifically with the tronxy firmware. I gotta say, that never really made a whole lot of since from the getgo. Think, if I can have complete, total remote user control from both octoprint, and repiteir server, then it’s not going to be the tronxy firmware, maybe astroprint firmware, but most likely the “lose nut” behind the “steering wheel”. And guess what… No surprise here. Absolute and complete remote user control. It’s quite w bit different than the repiteir software that I’m used too, so it’s taking me a bit to run through everything that’s there, and there’s a LOT there. That’s pretty much the end of any frustration related to the interface. It is a well thought out and laid out design. Contains a lot of options for the user, more than repiteir, and definitely in a whole upper lever than octoprint. I wouldn’t ever consider using octoprint again. I’m still a big fan of repiteir, but their setup support is just total dog sh__. Having said that, I’m really liking astroprint so far. Has all the advanced features and settings that regular high end users will require, has a lot available options for everything related to printing, printer and printer maintenance and support, anything related to filiment, it is an all inclusive one stop shop for your printer and printing needs. Once I’m done getting to know all of it , and complete all of my adjustments to settings, I’ll share some videos.
