00 Intro

The Escher system requires that each 3D printer gantry has a dedicated MCU endpoint. To satisfy this requirement, the system can have either of the following setups:

• One Raspberry Pi computer running MCU per gantry and an additional Raspberry Pi computer as a master controller for all the gantries
• One dedicated raspberry pi that can act as the conductor and dispatch gcode to each 3d printer controller.

Below are instructions for installing Machine Collaboration Utility (aka MCU) software on a single Raspberry Pi. The process for setting up multiple Raspberry PIs for an Escher System is nearly identical. In an escher system, the furthest left gantry (closest to X origin) will be labeled bot1 and each sequential gantry will be named sequentially, (i.e. bot2, bot3, etc…)

We will start by setting up "bot1". Repeat these steps for bot2, bot3, ... etc... as necessary.

Prerequisites:

• MCU currently only supports Marlin firmware and similar Serial based CNC firmware. In case your firmware isn't suppored, or if you have any other feature requests, please click here to request a new feature.
• We are assuming that you will be setting up each Raspberry Pi from a Windows machine.
• Your computer and each Raspberry Pi needs to have access to the same network. Be sure that your ethernet or wifi router has enough available ethernet ports to support the number of raspberry pis that you are connecting. In case more ports are needed, an ethernet switch can extend the number of available ports.
• You will need to have Bonjour installed in order to access each Raspberry Pi at a "Human-Friendly" IP address. Download Bonjour Print Services for Windows here. After installing Bonjour, and also in the case of networking issues, restarting the computer is a good first-step for troubleshooting.
• The MCU user interface is browser-based, however, it has only been tested with Chrome. If you do not currently have Chrome installed, here is a download link.