While most people still have trouble setting up an inkjet
printer on a wireless network, a group of intrepid IT hackers
are making big strides with far more advanced machines, using
the tiny Raspberry Pi microcomputer to untether laptops from
their 3-D printers. Zachary Bales is an undergraduate studying
electrical engineering and physics at Cal State Long Beach. He
got into building a RepRap while acting as president of his
engineering class. 3-D printing technology felt futuristic, but
leaving a laptop attached to a printer for the duration of a
modest five-hour print job seemed as dreadful as history class.
So he tricked out his Prusa Mendel RepRap with a Raspberry Pi, a
7-inch touchscreen tablet, and some code from Github. “I just
wanted to make a self-contained system that was easily
transportable,” says Bales. “I am using my main computer to do
the slicing of the STL files to generate the gcode. Right now I
am saving everything to my Dropbox account and just downloading
the G-Code files on the Pi.” The