Flashair Desktop App Mac
FlashAir™ Configuration Software (“Software”) Support OS: Mac OS® X（v10.6,v10.7） Software Installation 1. Required Operating Systems: Mac OS X（v10.6,v10.7）. Required SD Interface Devices: SD Slot on personal computers (“PC”) / USB SD reader. Please ensure your SD Interface Device is compatible with the SDHC interface. Download Slack for free for mobile devices and desktop. Keep up with the conversation with our apps for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux. FlashAir Setting: Start automatically at boot This mode is set as the default setting. The wireless LAN functionality of the Product will run automatically when the device which contains the Product is turned on. 'SSID' and 'Password' setup on this window will be used for the FlashAir Wireless LAN connection. Download FlashAir ™ Configuration Software (for Mac OS) 'FlashAirtoolv401K.dmg'. Double-click the downloaded 'FlashAirtoolv401K.dmg'. A new Finder window containing the 'FlashAirTool.app' is automatically displayed. FlashAir™ Configuration Software (“Software”) Support OS: Mac OS® X（v10.6,v10.7） Software Installation 1. Required Operating Systems: Mac OS X（v10.6,v10.7）. Required SD Interface Devices: SD Slot on personal computers (“PC”) / USB SD reader. Please ensure your SD Interface Device is compatible with the SDHC interface. Date Version Description; January 31, 2020: V4.0.1 The wireless LAN startup image is modified. Support macOS 10.15 June 16, 2017: V4.0.0 Add support for FlashAir ™ W-04. A malfunction in which FlashAir ™ drive does not work with macOS 10.12 is modified. April 24, 2017: V3.0.3 A malfunction in which the wireless LAN startup image, the default image file in FlashAir ™, ('DCIM' '100TSB.
Hooking into your printer without wires
Flashair Desktop App Mac Desktop
TL;DR Summary
I love my Flashforge Creator PRO, the printers are great, they are fast, good quality and reasonably priced. however much of their reliability and performance comes from the tireless efforts of the team behind the firmware they use, “Sailfish”.
The community around the sailfish firmware has largely rejected the use of on line USB connections to drive their printers, and largely rely on sdcards to move jobs from their computers to their printers.
There are many advantages to sdcards but they are also fiddly and awkward to use, continuously moving sdcards around, stresses the cards, their reader slots are often damaged and these fragile media can succumb to cracks and other breakage.
The Toshiba Flashair WiFi sdcard is a great solution to avoid the need to keep swapping around cards, but before we have a detailed look at this product and how it can be configured to work with the Flashforge, we should have a look at why sdcards are used so extensively for this application.
This article will describe the Flashair Wifi sdcard, show how it can be used in this application, and show how to set it up.
Read on for more details
A tale of two firmwares and their communities
There are two main firmwares in general use in the 3d printing world, both coincidentally with names based on Deep Sea Game Fish. While other firmwares exist, they are either derivatives of the main two or command a much smaller market. We will describe the two firmwares and how their communities have arrived at different strategies for getting work to their printers.
Marlin.
Of the two firmwares Marlin is probably the more accessible and hack-able, if your thing is designing and building your own printers, or modding and hacking an existing commercial printer then Marlin is the best bet for you. It is the Windows of the 3D Printer firmware world, supporting (to a variable degree) a very wide range of hardware and add-ons.
Marlin interprets a stream of g-code commands which have evolved from the languages used to control industrial lathes, CNC machines and laser-cutters. New functions have been added for supporting remote configuration, controlling extruder's and heat-beds, and dealing with an XY system that is more “ballistic” than the rigid, heavy industrial cutters it has grown from.
Most Marlin users print directly from their host PC's using a USB connection, although Marlin will accept jobs given to it on an sdcard reader if fitted, but its not the common way of driving the printer. The vast majority of the “Reprap” printers that use Marlin are not fitted with standalone controls or displays, and cant operate independently of a PC computer driving it via USB.
Sailfish
Sailfish is more like Apple OSX of the 3D printer firmware world, its targeted on a much narrower range of hardware and printer configurations than Marlin is and is defiantly designed for speed, in Marlin all the transformations between real-world measurements in millimeters and stepper motor pulse trains are done inside the firmware, requiring multiple transformations between the two coordinate spaces as the firmware builds your model. Sailfish neatly sidesteps this by having the host computer perform all those transformations upfront before sending the resulting binary format to the printer. This results in smaller build files, faster operation, and far better use of the limited resources available in an 8-bit AVR processor.
Sailfish is also similar in concept to a Java VM. It ultimately uses an equivalent (but not identical) flavor of g-code to the Marlin system, but during the conversion of coordinates to stepper motor steps in the host computer, the g-code is also compiled down into a compact binary format known as X3G which is delivered to the printer in a similar fashion to the way that Java produces a byte-code file from a Java source file. This obviously contributes to Sailfish's higher performance, as it eliminates a certain amount of need to parse input and check parameters as that is processed in the computer driving the printer.
The community around sailfish have correctly identified that on-line USB printing is a major pain in the ****, slowdowns and 'glitches' in the USB transfer, result in slow printing, pauses in transfer that can cause marks or 'hickies' in the print where the hotend has rested on one place for too long.
The Sailfish/X3G Community has evolved a common belief that printing via a sdcard is the best way to guarantee good quality, reliable prints and not tie up your computer for many many hours whilst printing. To that end, Every Sailfish based printer that the author is aware of, is fitted with a display, keypad and more importantly an sdcard Reader. Off-line printing via the sdcard is definitely the norm for this firmware.
So whats wrong with sdcards.
So Marlin users do it with a USB cable, and Sailfish users such as Flashforge and Makerbot owners, prefer to shuffle around their cards.
On the face of it sdcards are ideal, they are compact, cheap, available in large capacities, what could possibly be the problem?.
- They are despite their appearance, quite fragile, accidentally flexing the card whilst inserting or removing it from the reader, can cause the card to crack.
- They rely on contacts that can easily oxidize, and result in poor connections.
- The reader slot can itself become easily damaged, its easy to place a card in skewed or even backwards. I have heard many stories about people pushing in cards the wrong way around.
- If you forget to safely eject the card before removing it from your computer you can end up corrupting the last file written, or even corrupting the whole file system on the card.
- There are often compatibility problems between the various different versions SD, SDXC. SDHC.
- Directory entry formats can be tricky, some writers can only write 8.3 file-names, some writers force uppercase file-names and extensions. Which cause problems if your printer is looking for a particular version.
- The write “lock” tab on the sdcard prevents writing to the media, but often the mechanism for reading the position of that tab are unreliable, resulting in cards becoming read only. Sometimes moving the tab up or down by small amounts can fix it, but its unpredictable.
- They can be dreadfully slow, writing a large file to an sdcard can take a long time. Various “classes” of card are available which indicates the speed of the card, but price rises fast as class number increases.
Given the need to perform action 4, the whole process of insert, write eject remove can take a lot of time. And slows down the whole work-flow.
If only there be a way to write data quickly and reliably onto an sdcard without having to remove it from the printer, eject its file-system and without all the associated compatibility problems listed above.
Well there is, its called a Toshiba Flashair.
Introducing the Flashair.
The Toshiba Flashair is a miracle of miniaturization, inside the diminutive slither of plastic is a full system on a chip (SoC) running Linux, with dual WiFi interfaces, 8, 16 or 32Gb of flash memory, static ram and program storage. The device probably hijacks a few megabytes of the main flash storage to store its operating system, so don't be disappointed if turns up short by a small amount in its expected storage capacity. The extra functionality enabled by that shortfall is well worth the reduction in storage size.
Other manufacturers produce simple but not identical products, notably Eye-Fi and Transcend.
When you insert it into a powered sdcard reader slot, it boots itself up from its program flash , enables whatever WiFi mode its been programmed to run in, and then starts emulating an sdcard. To the system it is plugged into it appears to be a normal sdcard.
The Flashair is mainly aimed at the digital camera toting crowd, and provides a convenient way to transfer images from your digital snapper to your desktop, tablet or phone. It must be said that the quality of the softeare provided with the Flashair is generally low. But given that it has several standards based features such as an HTTP interface you can usually work around its shortcomings.
The boot cycle can take up to 2-3 minutes, especially if its setup up to connect to your Wi-Fi network, so dont get worried if it takes a little while to appear on your network.
The Wi-Fi component can operate in 3 different modes dependent on its configuration, Access Point (AP) mode, Client or station (STA) mode and Pass-through mode which is a combination of both AP and STA mode.
The way you connect to the card depends on how it is configured, but effectively once you are connected you can open an address in your browser, and a mini web-server in the card will show you its contents and allow you to change ts settings.
Lets walk through the different ways the card can connect.
Access point (AP) mode.
In this mode the card behaves like its own WiFi router, and will appear in the list of available WiFi networks visible from your computer or device. You connect to it in the same way that you would any other Wi-Fi network. By default the card when it is first powered up goes into this mode and it creates an automatic network name of “Flashair_XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”, where the X's are a long random character sequence. The default password is “12345678”.
Connect to the network and open the url “http://flashair” to view the cards contents and access the configuration program.
Warning: you can change the name of the network that it creates in this mode, DON'T do what I did which was to put the name and password of my WiFi router in, as you wont be able to access it again unless you turn of your WiFi Router, this is because both your WiFi router and the Flashair card are trying to be the access point for the same network, probably on different channels, so any client trying to connect to it will get extremely confused
in AP mode you wont be able to access the Internet or other devices on your home network until you disconnect and reconnect to your WiFi router.
AP mode is mainly designed to support the cards operation away from home, inserted into a camera, and provides a convenient way of downloading images into your phone or tablet without wires or sdcard reader adapters. It is the default mode that the card selects on initial power-up, before any configuration has been performed
Pass-through (BP) mode.
One of the obvious down sides of the AP mode above, is that once you connect your device (workstation, phone, tablet), to the Flashair WiFi access point, then you cant connect to the Internet. It is a real pain if for example you want to browse photos on the Flashair card, and upload selected ones to facebook or flickr.
Passthrough mode is designed to overcome this by making use of another unique feature of the Flashair card, two Wi-Fi interfaces !!!!!!. You can use the configuration tool to add your home Wi-Fi network to the Internet bypass configuration screen, and allow your Flashair card to also attach to your router as a client. Any requests that you send to the Flashair card via its AP connection that are not for the Flashair card, are routed to your WiFi router in “bridge” mode, making your device appear to be on your internal network whilst connected to the Flashair.
Don't be deceived by this slight of hand, again its mainly designed to support away from home use again, allowing you to connect to your hotel or cafe Internet connection to perform your shuffle of images off to your photo sharing service. However all traffic between your device and the Internet is being passed through the Flashair card, and given its diminutive size, its is not the fastest network router in the world, so you can forget YouTube and netflicks whilst connected in bypass mode.
Client or Station (STA) mode.
Now we get to the exciting mode for us 3d printing geeks, Client or Station mode (STA), in this mode the Flashair card becomes a normal client on your Internal WiFi Network, with an allocated IP address that you can communicate with from any computer on your network. In this respect it behaves like a network attached storage system.
You can use this IP Address to access the card in your browser to view what is stored on the card, and upload new files to it while it is still plugged into your printer. File transfer is fast, about 0.5Mb/s, allowing me to upload fairly large 15Mb x3g files in just under 30 seconds. By contrast sending that amount of data across a USB 2.0 link to an Arduino or other 3D printer controller can take up to 30 minutes.
The IPaddress it gets is the one assigned by your router, if you have sufficient access you can tell your router to give any device with a given MAC address (low level address of network card) a fixed IP Address. The MAC address of the Flashair is printed at the bottom of the back of the card. You should be able to plug this into your router to get a fixed IP Address assigned to the card, this prevents the random assignment of addresses on connection.
Flashair Mac App
Unfortunately although this is the most interesting mode for us matter hackers, its not supported by any of the configuration programs available for the Flashair (see, I told you Toshiba software was rubbish).
Fortunately there is a simple way around this that allows us to configure this mode, and several other features that are needed to make it useful with a 3D printer. In order to do this we will have to get down and dirty with a text editor, and attack a hidden boot configuration file on the Flashair card used to control all of its functions. Chrome app mac download.
Configuring the Flashair in STA mode for your printer.
For the sake of this tutorial, we will assume my WiFi Network is called “TOMJONES” and the password is “GREENGRASS” (its not, but the extra search traffic from the knicker throwing brigade will help out nicely with our stats). We will also assume that the printer is called the imaginatively named “printer01”
App folder icon mac. First some warnings
- Make a backup of the CONFIG file before you do anything, copy it to your computer so its nice and safe. The config file is in a hidden directory and has the path /SD_WLAN/CONFIG .
- You MUST use an editor that uses “UNIX” line ends (the card runs Linux), if you don't then none of your changes will be loaded. Notepad is out, Notepad++ configured in UNIX line-end mode is OK, virtually any Linux command-line editor (Emacs, vim, vi, nano etc) is OK. As is most MAC OS X editors
- The file you will be editing will be inside a hidden directory, so if you are not using a command line, you have to configure your OS file explorer to show hidden files.
- The sdcard is formatted as fat32, so there are no file permissions to worry about, but for heavens sake, don't try to format it as something else.
- Don't use 'unusual' characters in the network-name, password and card name, the configuration file parser is pretty primitive, and would get hung up on things like commas etc/
Assuming that you have all the above sorted out, pop the Flashair into an sdcard reader on your laptop or desktop, and look for a hidden directory called SD_WLAN.
On Linux or a Mac I would open a terminal and type
On windows use your favorite text-editor that can handle Unix line-ends as per item 2 above.
The file contents should look something like this:
Note: that there will already be entries in your copy of the file for VERSION, CID, PRODUCT, VENDOR, MASTERCODE, LOCK and APPINFO so don't change those entries from what you have, they are unique to your setup.
If you edit the file multiple times you may find that the APPNETWORKKEY= pasword has been replaced with a bunch of asterisks ie. “**********”, you should put the password back in before saving it again.
Once you have edited the file, write it back to the sdcard, don't forget to dismount or eject the card correctly. Then put the flash-air card into your printer and power it up.
After a short while if everything is OK, the printer should connect to your internal network (it can initially take up to 5 mins so be patient). The best way to see if it has attached and find its ip address is to open your WiFi router configuration screens and look for a screen that provides information on “attached devices”.
I was pleasantly surprised that the metal frame of my printer did not seem to interfere with the WiFi signal the card was using to attach to my router, which was quite a distance away. I had been expecting a problem and had anticipated having to buy an sdcard slot extender so I could mount the card outside of the printer enclosure. The temperature of the inside of my enclosure gets up to 55c, with the heat bed up full at 110c. The high ambient temp does not seem to bother the Flashair card.
Sending a file to your printer
Once you are connected up and good to go sending a file to the printer is childsplay, just open the upload form on the Flashair in your web browser by accessing the following URL
Which should produce a form that looks like this. Just select your file and hit the submit button, and bobs your uncle.
Once the upload is complete you should be able to use the 'print from sdcard' menu to start up your print.
Giving Your Flashair a fixed address
When the flashair card attaches to your network, it gets allocated an address using a dynamic configuration protocol (DHCP) implemented in your WiFi router. While the router will try to allocate the same address each time, it will if the machine has been offline for a while, possibly give it a different IP address. The time that the router reserves the address for the device is known as its 'lease time', and in some routers it can be quite small, 2-3 days.
If you want to make sure that your card always gets the same ipaddress you have to reserve an address using your router. Most routers have the ability to associate a 'MAC' address which is a kind of low-level fingerprint, assigned to each networking device that uses Ethernet and is unique to each device, with a fixed ip address. In order to make this mapping you have to get the MAC address of the Flashair
The MAC address is printed on the back of each card and can be used to preallocate an ipaddress slot in the router.
My router has a screen like shown here to allow me to enter preallocatioins.
Once you have preallocated an address you can add it to the 'hosts' file on your system so that you dont have to remember it each time, for example it can be added as 'printer01'
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