A suddenly requested poll — internet in the shop

[WillAdams]

My way this time.

Intended for the average user, not people w/ a vested interest, so no ballot box stuffing. You can vote once, and no changing.

Please feel free to comment on your vote, explain your answer, or discuss this matter (politely) in this thread.

[MeanderBolt]

I don't like, nor feel comfortable with leaving my machine for more than a few minutes. I have WiFi so I can surf the Internet whilst milling. But I also run my machine from second computer which is running chilipeppr (i. e. is connected as well). I understand that you could mill and surf from the same machine, but I had a bad experience doing that and don't trust it so much.

To be honest, regardless of flavor of sender, I don't get what the big issue is about having your machine be connected. It's not like its a hard thing to run a cat5/6 line a hundred feet, or set up wifi, or even a WiFi extender.

[SmokyRick]

I have internet in the shop, BUT it is sometimes so slow as to not be available. I do NOT like programs that depend on internet connection. We live out in the country, 8 miles away is our town. We have not got quality internet service here that we can count on. Some days fine, but other days ...

[Atonwa]

I have purchased a dedicated older refurbished desktop workstation for use with my Shapeoko 3 and the Routakit. This will stay disconnected from the Internet. I plan to create files on my laptop and then manually transfer them over to the desktop. Just seems easier than having the hassles of virus protection and windows updates constantly.

[Woodworker]

My shop is in a detached garage and I do have wifi but my wife has her embroidery/quilting shop upstairs with her laptop connected to a google drive and her iPad streaming Pandora. I have my laptop connected to a Google drive and my SO2, an iPad 1 streaming pandora and iPad Air 2 for sifting through this forum to find out why my machine is is doing its own thing. While there may be sufficient bandwidth at times, it is not consistent enough to rely on for machine control. I plan to try GRBLweb and few others but won't be using anything internet based in the current future.

My laptop is an older thinkpad and I have auto updates turn off. The first Saturday of the month I go around to all the computing devices we have and upgrade the OS and all the apps. This prevents the auto reboot interrupting either my wife's emprodery jobs or my CNC jobs.

[madhatter]

I'll do my designing in the house then drop the completed work on my FreeNAS and go out to my shop and grab the file and drag it to my laptop and send it to my Shapeoko.

[CastIrony]

Our wifi didn't stretch to the garage, but I bought a cheap powerline network kit at Fry's that included a wifi repeater, which I installed in the garage. Works great!

[Woodworker]

Just an interesting side note. AOL just released their quarterly earnings report. In there was an income line for "active dialup subscribers" at 2.1 million people. The article went on to say that most of these people have no other way to connect to the Internet (other than satellite). They are not being frugal nor nostalgic, it's their only connection option.

[Hans]

My Shapeoko lives in my parents' basement. I don't, so I have an old laptop running the machine and I remote to my desktop in CT to grab NC files. Once I have the NC files locally, I run them with a non-internet g-code sender. Maybe I'm stuck in the dark ages, but the basement wifi is unreliable.

[WillAdams]

Yeah, I'd still be paying for a dial-up connection just to have the fall-back option and to maintain personal web-presence, but AOL killed off the latter, so I reverted my (charter member) account to a free one (bundled w/ my Verizon FIOS account while they had that option).