If you’ve purchased a PowerSpec “ultra” printer from Microcenter (or bought one of the other rebranded models), you’re probably disappointed in the slicer options. It comes with an old version of FlashPrint, PowerPrint, that is no longer updated. Hopefully, you’ve figured out that the latest versions of FlashPrint from FlashForge work perfectly fine with your PowerSpec printer by creating great gcode files you can print from your SD card. But what about Wi-Fi?
Unfortunately, all of the network printing features are broken as the software is looking for a hard-coded string in the firmware at connection time. In the spirit of “right to repair,” I’ve created a simple network proxy that sits between the FlashPrint software and your PowerSpec printer to fix that problem and let you monitor and print from the software just like you could in PowerPrint.
Using the Script
To use this, you’ll need to install Python on your computer. If you have a Mac, it’s probably already installed. Just download the file below and run it from a command prompt/terminal like:
python flashprintproxy.py <PRINTERIP>
If you don’t know what your printer’s IP address is, just go to your printer, make sure it’s turned on, and go to Tools/Settings/Wifi to get your IP address. You can also hard code it in the python file if you prefer.
Once you’ve done this, you can go to the printer settings in FlashPrint and put in 127.0.0.1 with port 8899. That’s the address where the Python script is working to connect to your printer and handle things. You can easily stop the script after your print is sent to the printer, or keep it running to see the status of your print.
Next up, I plan to create some scripts for sending prints to the printer without FlashPrint for easy automation from any slicer.
Your mileage may vary. I offer the below with no warranty! The code is yours to try and change as you desire.