SD card upload

[ErikDeBruijn]

There currently is no support for uploading files to the SD card during printing for untethered printing. This would be very useful to have. Just printing a file preloaded on the SD card would also be a big bonus, especially with an LCD, so you can have a fully standalone machine.

[JelleB]

going the sd card route is a detour, I would think: if you use a at90USBkey instead of a arduino mega, then you can let it function as a mass storage device, store your g-code file on the onboard memory (only a few Mb, but much more than a stock arduino). In effect this means that you connect to the host computer with usb (no serial bottleneck), upload your g-code, and disconnect again. From there you start the build with the lcd-interface?

The downside is that this USB key is in short supply and has no nice 1/10 pin layout and you need some more changes to fully support it.

[ErikDeBruijn]

Thanks JelleB, for the suggestion. I'll definitely look into this! I had other plans for giving it more connectivity (running Linux), but this seems like a viable path too...