# Ethernet And Wifi At Same Time.



## jbolt (Nov 10, 2016)

I recently changed the PC on my mill. The new PC has built-in wifi which I want to use to be able to load g-code files from the office PC where I do the CAM/CAM. The motion contriller (SmoothStepper) is ethernet based so when it is plugged in the the mill PC it disables the wifi. Does anyone know if there is a way to use both at the same time?


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## Tony Wells (Nov 10, 2016)

There are ways, but it can get kind of geeky. The main trick is establishing the ability, sometimes in the BIOS, sometimes in the OS, to allow simultaneous use. And to get it to work you have to set up each type of connection as a different physical network. Of course, modern computers are made for non-technical people for the most part, and make all this stuff happen in the background to make using the network and its resources available. You have to dig in and make some manual changes, in your case, I would say to the wired connection since it is dedicated to a single purpose. 

Or you might consider adding an adapter to your SmoothStepper to convert it to wireless and just operate on the same network. Of course, there are catches to that solution, especially if there are other users on the wireless portion of your LAN. Some may be easy to overcome, some may be virtually insurmountable. I'm not the geek I used to be, so I probably can't walk you through it step by step, but someone else here probably is up to date enough to advise.


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## Boswell (Nov 10, 2016)

JBolt  just do a google search. I am sure you will find some good answers. I am pretty sure it is an advanced setting in the adapter driver but how you get to that can be different for different Operating systems.  I have not had a problem with having my Smoothstepper just plugged into the Ethernet switch I have in the shop along with several other devices including the Mach3 system. One time it shut down during an operation due to the buffer underflowing. I bought a second NIC card to address this but have not installed it yet because, it has not happened again.


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## jbolt (Nov 11, 2016)

I found the problem. Windows 10 , in its infinite wisdom, decided to setup the smooth stepper on an undefined LAN network vs the smooth stepper network that the SS installer sets up. I was able to delete the undefined network and windows then reassigned the smooth stepper to the correct network. Yay for windows!


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