Using a Raspberry Pi + Octopi to manage your printer

[gmay3]

Firstly, thanks very much to dacb for this great guide!

All the hardware I've listed in my previous post worked great and needed no drivers at all!

After about an hour of work I got it working! I still have a little tweaking to do (I'll elaborate in the last paragraph) but I was able to slice from my computer, send the gcode file to my printer, set and view real time graphical heating temperatures of the hotend and bed, move the axes around remotely, and watch the high quality video feed from my browser! SO COOL! The interface that you interact with from your browser is super polished, which was a very nice surprise. The only thing I couldn't do from my computer was level the bed manually :P

One other great thing that was in the OctoPi preferences was that I could easily switch the direction of all my x axis movement commands, this is something that has annoyed me with pronterface (which I probably could have fixed with some effort). For some reason I had to reverse the connection on my x motor cable during the build to get it to home correctly so my x movement commands in pronterface have always been reversed.

I need to work on setting up the static router settings for the Pi and set up the remote VPN stuff, though this wasn't super important to me. I'm not going to run my printer without being home, it's just not reliable enough! Also, for some reason, my first print seemed to have a similar gcode error that other folks have had before where the print stayed adhered to the bed but the gcode seemed to shift during print in the wrong directions. Looking at the STL through slic3r it looked fine. I recently changed computers so I think something went wrong with slic3r's settings. I don't think this has anything to do with OctoPi but haven't solved the problem yet.

UPDATE

The gcode error I though I was having had nothing to to with OctoPi.

After a couple hours of trying to figure out what the problem with my print was, I discovered that the belt pulley on my y bed had loosened over time. One of the set screws came completely out of the hole and was lying on the table right below it. I now have loctite blue'd both set screws on both the X belt pulley and Y belt pulley.