I've been asked by some friends to demonstrate and talk about 3D printing to a group of people. What I would like to do is take my 3D printer along there to show them how it works etc. Is there a way to connect my printer with octoprint from a laptop outside of my home network.
I would like to demonstrate the whole process from very simple CAD design to Slicers and printing.
Obviously it wont be connected to my home network and I'm assuming I can use a network cable between the Pi and laptop. But how do I go about it.
I should be able to use the printer as a stand alone with the internal SD reader but since using Klipper I cannot read anything from the SD card or access it from the control panel on the printer
You could either set up the Pi as an AP, and then connect your laptop to that, or maybe the other way round. Don't think just a straight network cable will work, as you'll need something to act to handle the network traffic, you can get network switches that do this I believe, but can't remember.
IMO, the simplest solution is a cheap router (a used Linksys WRT54G is a good choice). Another option is a cell phone with hotspot capabilities (if the hotspot allows multiple connections and traffic between them).
You can connect the RPi and the Laptop with a single "null modem or crossover" network cable or two normal cables and a switch but you would need to configure either the RPi or the Laptop with a DHCP server and DNS server (or use static IP addresses). Unless you are comfortable doing network guru type things, either of the above solutions avoids the complications of doing it this way.
I'm 99% sure a straight through cable will work. Especially of the pi is gigabit. Gigabit has the ability to auto negotiate whether you are using a straight through or crossover cable. And I think even the older non gigabit Pi's can probably do the same.
After that you just need to make sure you assign both devices an IP on the same subnet and you should be good to go.
Thanks for your suggestions guys, that's given me a few things to try. I'll probably be coming back with a few more questions as i get deeper into it..
Regarding using the Linksys WRT54G router is that a particular choice for a reason or just cheap ? I have an unused Netgear WNR2000 kicking around, but having connected it up I'm even struggling to get into the setup pages.
The Linksys WRT54G router is both cheap and versatile. It was one of the first routers to have open source router firmware available.
However, there's no need to buy one if you have an unused router kicking around. The Netgear WNR2000 should be perfect. You will need to determine what revision you have but documentation is available online. Do a factory reset and then the default username / password should be published / printed on the router.
Only some revisions of this router are compatible with OpenWRT, DD-WRT, etc. replacement firmware but the stock firmware should be all you need for your demonstration.