Last night, I was successfully able to directly connect to my makerbot 5th over ip with help from a network usb server.
I've tried a few usb servers in the past. All would show the printer in system devices, but s3d would never identify it as a printer. The only funny thing I noticed was that the location of the device was listed as Location 0, but when it was actually plugged in via usb, it would be something like hub #001 port #0002 or something.
Here is the device I'm using, which I had sitting around already:
https://www.tp-link.com/us/products/det ... S310U.html
I don't understand enough about the workings of usb, so take this next part with a grain of salt. Someone smarter than me should be able to give a proper explanation.
My immediate hunch is that the function call s3d does to find usb devices does not find network usb server devices. I ran a powershell command to list out connected usb devices and it too left out the network usb server device. I guess windows just treats it differently somehow.
PS> gwmi Win32_USBControllerDevice |%{[wmi]($_.Dependent)} |
>> Sort Description,DeviceID | ft Description,DeviceID -auto
My hope then was that I could somehow remap the usb location to somewhere s3d would check. I then installed a program that lets you treat a usb device on another pc as local (https://www.virtualhere.com/). I ran the server on my pc and it was able share the printer via the network usb server. I then ran the client application to make it a virtual usb device on my machine and viola, s3d now sees the printer. I was able to send a print job directly from s3d, but I did not do any significant amounts of testing.
Your mileage might vary, but I just thought I'd share. There's a good chance this will work with any usb 3d printer.
