Using a Raspberry Pi + Octopi to manage your printer

[clough42]

I have Octopi setup on both of my printers, and I'm loving it. I'm powering the Raspberry Pi from the 5VSB bus of the power supply, so it is always on, and I can turn the 12V power on and off with GCODE using the power supply output on the RAMPS board.

Here's the wiring:

Raspberry Pi:

• Powered through the GPIO port (be careful--there's no reverse polarity protection)
• One +5v pin to PS 5VSB
• One GND pin to PS GND

RAMPS:

• D1 cut or removed
• Both + power terminals to power supply+12V
• Both - power terminals to power supply GND
• VCC to power supply 5VSB
• 5V to power supply 5V or 5VSB
• PS-ON to power supply green wire

This way, the Pi is always on, and I can turn the 12V power to the printer on and off with GCODE M80/M81. I have buttons defined in the Octoprint UI to do this, and I also do it in the start/end GCODE generated out of my slicer.

Some notes:

Because of the USB connection to the RAMPS board, it's always going to be on, too, so I just go ahead and connect RAMPS VCC to 5VSB as well. No point trying to turn it on and off with the power supply--especially since you need it to handle the M80/M81 commands. I also wouldn't count on the USB power from the Pi to power it (and the LCD). Depending which version of the Pi, the RAMPS LCD, the WiFi dongle and the webcam, the internal fuses in the Pi can be overloaded and cause resets and lockups. Running separate power to the RAMPS solves this.

The 5V bus on the RAMPS (used to power the Z probe servo) can be connected to 5V or 5VSB. It doesn't matter.

I ran separate 5V conductors (20AWG) from the power supply to the pi and to each point on the RAMPS to try to keep noise (especially from the Z probe servo) from messing up the Pi.

[clough42]

Some photos of my setups:

2014-12-29 10.24.09.jpg2014-12-29 10.25.04.jpg

[TopJimmyCooks]

Looks like you got a longer cable for the camera - does it work well? Where did you get it from?