Want to use Astrobox to manage users at my coworking space - any best practices?

AstroBox Questions
#1

Hi Astrobox Community!
I personally have about 4x machines all running Astroprint using Raspberry Pi Astroboxes and I’d like to have 1 or more of them be accessible to a handful of qualified users / students. Running into so challenges though. Some questions:

  1. is it possible to control user access to one machine? Or provide access to a machine to a list of specific users / emails? I have 3 maker spaces / classrooms I’d like to install this on: Bespoke Coworking Space in SF, CA, UC Berkeley at the Haas School of Business and possibly at the TechShop in SF.

  2. Connecting Astroboxes to Corporate WiFi continues to be a pain. Only solution I’ve found is that I have to bring in my own WiFi hub, plug it into an Ethernet port and then distribute my own WiFi signal to the students / users. I still have to have / share passwords or give people access to my account if I want to provide them access via Astroprint / Astrobox. We’ve already had DoS attacks against our Astroboxes in these corporate environments so our IT are very unsupportive of unfirewalled solutions.

  3. The latest update (8.3–>8.4) doesn’t appear to be downloading. Do any of you have any thoughts onto which version of Astrobox is most stable / reliable?

  4. I’d also like to achieve this in a bot-farm like environment (as I have a rack of various 3D printing machines that I’d like to send various files to and have it print on machines that are available). Anyone know of any solutions?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts. I hope we can solve some of these problems together!

Happy New Year!
Chris

1 Like
#2

Chris –

1.) This is definitely one of those “requested” features, but the functionality you are looking for is not 100% available at the moment. If I were to do do this, I would probably take the following approach:

  • Setup a specific astroprint.com account and associate the astroboxes you want to share with the online cloud account (astroprint.com).

  • Share the login to that cloud account with your trusted/qualified students.

It’s pretty straightforward and rudimentary, so I doubt it meets all your requirements. Additionally, a future possibility might be having an APP that will enable all of this functionality. AstroPrint DOES have an APP STORE, but it’s not yet open to the public/developers. When the API’s are in place and the APP store is open, if you have the resources, you can probably make an app that will enable anyone to manage multiple users/printers within AstroPrint. (i.e: an Access Control App)

2.) Apologies. This is another issue that’s not fully functional yet. The AstroBox still has some trouble with certain WiFi networks that require web based authentication etc… We expect to have this fixed though. (I don’t have an approximate date though)

3.) v0.8(4) is definitely the latest/stable version as of right now. If you see a “Stuck” progress bar when attempting to update the AstroBox, it most likely updated fine (I have run into this issue as well) – but just to be sure, try rebooting the box, going into Settings then re-installing the update/firmware.

4.) This is a neat idea indeed. My answer to #1 still applies here. If we don’t roll this feature out in the future, someone (perhaps you? :wink:) can utilize our API’s to make such an app on the AstroPrint platform. Free/Paid/Trial versions are all possibilities…

I hope I came somewhat close to answering your questions.

Let me know if I didn’t! :smiley:

Happy new year to you as well!

#3

@dilanka Thanks for such a thorough response!! Very much appreciated and I understand you guys are working hard to build out the features we’ve requested. :smile:

Yea, we have many students here at UC Berkeley who are probably qualified to hack some of these problems a bit to get the desired functionality. I’ve worked with Drew and Daniel already to troubleshoot some issues and you guys have great customer / tech support.

I’m definitely looking at getting involved in the Astroprint app store. I’m not a developer but have been doing some programming. What are the basics to get started using your APIs / App environments? What could I be teaching myself to integrate my webplatform into your product(s) and services? I’m becoming more dangerous in RoR, HTML and Javascript but I’m told Python is the right language to use for hardware / software interfacing.

Thanks again,
Chris

p.s. did you folks develop this forum in-house or is this a gem / plugin / service that can be utilized by other companies as well? Would love to know! thanks!

#4

No problem!

@Chris_McCoy: Unfortunately, while the API is somewhat functional – there’s virtually ZERO documentation online. Once @Daniel finishes on V1 of the API, we are likely going to work on the documentation for developers and anyone else interested in tinkering with it…

As for the API/App Store – You are likely going to be interacting with a REST API to communicate and retrieve/send data to/from AstroPrint. Standard web languages should be pretty effective (i.e: Javascript, XML, Python, PHP).

Don’t quote me on that though – @Daniel will have a much clearer answer since he’s the one working on it :stuck_out_tongue:

With that said, the “Access Control” feature is a popular one and if you know someone who is interested in coming up with some prototypes when our API opens up, that would be super neat. I am sure it will be used by others too…because we get emails from people in similar environments (i.e: schools, educational institutions etc…).

This forum is a (slightly) modified version of Discourse :wink: