Accessing in-built UltiMaker3 camera remotely

[ShinerG 6]

Hi folks,

 

  I’m new to UltiMaker, but have been using FDM printers for years. I loved the idea of having a camera mounted in the printer for monitoring my builds and to be able to abort if necessary. I was annoyed to discover after buying it last week that it is only when on the network. 

 

I didn’t want to mess with routers,  IP addresses and firewalls. So I looked at another option to remotely access my home printer when off-site.

 

I’m using TeamViewer (but I’m sure any remote access tool would work). I’ve paired my workstation to my laptop with the programme and use the smartphone app too. 

 

Now I can access my home PC and monitor the build from within Cura’s interface. The video quality is great and I love the idea that I can abort directly from Cura. 

 

I’d imagine that this only works when printing across the network and not off the USB key. 

 

Hopefully others will find this quick-cheat useful. 

 

Shane

Edited February 28, 2018 by ShinerG

[gr5 2,269]

Using team viewer is fine.  There are other products like VNC as well.  But most of these have bugs that let people take over your computer despite the passwords and experts recommend running these ONLY over a VPN tunnel with SSL encryption.

 

Personally, if all you want is to control your printer, I would read about how to allow ports through your router.  Typically you can pick any port from 2000 to 30,000 and assign that to translate to the needed ports on your printer.  So for example I believe port 80 is the main port that the UM3 exposes (maybe there is another?  I forget).  So you could have port 12380 on your router map to port 80 on your um3.  Or even port 80 on your router to port 80 on your um3 but I think cura will let you pick the port.

 

Someone breaking into my UM3 http port is not as serious as someone having control over my main computer.

[ahoeben 2,012]

1 hour ago, gr5 said:

Someone breaking into my UM3 http port is not as serious as someone having control over my main computer.

 

There could be a security vulnerability in the software that responds to that http port though, and it could be a vector to gain access to the whole machine. And once "they" have access to the machine, they are on your network. It is generally a bad idea to forward anything that is not inherently secured to/from direct internet access.

[gr5 2,269]

This is true.  A VPN to your home network is best.

 

But there's also security though obscure equipment and UM3's are not popular enough to be in the top 100 attack vectors.  but it's absolutely true that if there is a way to get into the printer through an http port it *might* be possible to take over the machine enough to then talk to the home/work router on that same network to open up ssh and then you are on the persons network.  But it's a much bigger stretch than using TeamViewer as an attack vector.  If you can hack TeamViewer or VNC (and I know for sure there are VNC hacks out there) that is a much more likely attack vector.