Upgrading the Robo C2 with Samba NETBIOS broadcasting and "net share"

I did an upgrade to my Robo C2 to allow files to be pushed directly onto the microSD card inside its Raspberry Pi 3 computer remotely. So now, I don't have to shuttle the USB drive back and forth during a heavy session of design-plus-test-prints. I created a repository to hold the step-by-step instructions.

Instructions

I've tested this and it seems to work on my network. Per the instructions, you should make a copy of your /etc/samba/smb.conf file so that you may easily revert back to before this attempt. If you wanted to be paranoid, feel free to burn an image of your microSD before doing this upgrade.

Notes:

The royalty-free Samba software is already running on the Raspberry Pi 3 that's inside this printer. What we're doing here is just tweaking the configuration file so that the NETBIOS name of the printer is being broadcast once per minute. Additionally, we're setting up a folder to be shared to other computers on the network (Windows/OS x) so that they may remotely push files to the same area that OctoPrint uses. Within OctoPrint's File area, there would be a new "share" folder as a destination where you have presumably copied files into this.

 

When was that ever needed?

 

I was actually printing to this via the iPhone app at some point (before I discovered the OctoPrint interface).

The technique would also work for mapping a drive to /home/pi, for example, to allow one to more easily look through the file system using other tools.

Note also that this upgrade should broadcast the printer's NETBIOS name on Microsoft networks as it does already for Bonjour.

And... it's going to come in handy when I implement the Amazon Echo/Alexa thing next since my remote Raspberry Pi Zero W won't have a speaker.