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.

[dacb]

Fantastic! Yeah, I really dig the UI. Intuitive and functional. Have you setup a time-lapse movie yet?

[gmay3]

No, I didn't get that set up yet but definitely will soon! I think I saw where do to it but I was just happy to be able to control and see the printer on camera remotely!

Are you able to auto level the bed from OctoPi? (maybe that would get me interested :P)

[dacb]

... Are you able to auto level the bed from OctoPi? (maybe that would get me interested :P)

In as much as you can issue a G28 X0 Y0 Z0 followed by a G29 in the Gcode terminal through the web interface. That terminal is pretty nice once you click the checkbox to suppress the M105 request/responses.

I should add that I've also begun uploading firmware via the Pi. There are two ways to do this:
1. There is a post in this thread that describes the command line setup of ino (a command line version of the Arduino IDE) and using it to upload to an Arduino board. Compilation is slow and you have to munge the .ino file to get it to work correctly with the Marlin.ino
2. Install avrdude and send the .hex file to the Pi and upload with avrdude at the command line. This is what I am doing. E.g.

• Install avrdude, on the Pi as pi@octopi:

sudo apt-get install avrdude

• Upload your hex to your Pi (pi@octopi). When you 'verify' (i.e. the check in the upper left corner which does a build without upload) the Marlin firmware in the Arduino IDE, the full path of the temporary .hex file will appear in the log at towards the end of the output. Note: for newer versions of the Arduino IDE, you will have to turn on "Show verbose logging" during compilation in the preferences. I use scp via the command line to copy that .hex file to the Pi (usually just into the root of the pi user home directory). For OS/X, Linux, and Windows there is almost certainly an sftp/scp GUI client. E.g. (example only!!!! where the hex ended up in /var/folders/nw/_0y0_37s63z_zj3kz42zw9jc0000gn/T/build6973326520497902471.tmp/Marlin.cpp.hex ):

scp /var/folders/nw/_0y0_37s63z_zj3kz42zw9jc0000gn/T/build6973326520497902471.tmp/Marlin.cpp.hex pi@octopi:

• Use avrdude to upload the .hex to the Arduino. Instead of using the Arduino IDE to upload the .hex, use the avrdude tool you installed. Behind the scenes, the Arduino IDE is using avrdude to upload the sketch. Skip the IDE an do it from the command line (for example with your firmware in the current working directory called Marlin.cpp.hex):

avrdude -p m2560 -c stk500v2 -P /dev/ttyACM0 -b 115200 -F -U flash:w:Marlin.cpp.hex

Warning: Use this at your own risk: Don't try this for your first Marlin firmware change. Make sure you can do that, at will, without problems on some other platform. That way, if this process doesn't work for you, you can reinstall the firmware with your known working method. Disclaimer end.

[gmay3]

In as much as you can issue a G28 X0 Y0 Z0 followed by a G29 in the Gcode terminal through the web interface. That terminal is pretty nice once you click the checkbox to suppress the M105 request/responses.

Sounds pretty awesome! Are you able to completely print and level remotely with a good success rate?

Agreed on the firmware changes, I definitely would take your advice to do the first one the traditional way but this sounds like a really cool feature! Thanks for the guide!

[dacb]

Sounds pretty awesome! Are you able to completely print and level remotely with a good success rate?

Yes. However, OctoPi doesn't give you anyway to remove the print from the bed!

[gmay3]

Very cool, I must say that is tempting then. Maybe I should look into auto bed leveling. Although it seems a little complex at the moment.

Yes. However, OctoPi doesn't give you anyway to remove the print from the bed!

WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY!
Untitled.jpg

[dacb]

Or: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:407800

[AbuMaia]

Or if you've printed a relatively tall object, just move the nozzle to X190 Y190 Z5, then slowly move Y back to 0. Let the X axis extrusions sweep it off.

[gmay3]

Here's a screen shot of a print in progress with OctoPrint!

octoprint.jpg