Using a Raspberry Pi + Octopi to manage your printer

[lakester]

I've skimmed the thread beforehand..., and what I'm wondering is why the OctoPi does better wrt the USB connection with the printer than, say, your typical PC/laptop/Mac/etc/etc. Does OctoPi drive the printer directly via gcodes through the USB interface, OR, does it simply upload the gcode to SD on the printer's controller? Thx!

[clough42]

I don't know if it's better than a PC. I guess it depends on the software.

OctoPrint has the ability to upload to the printer's SD card, but most people just print directly from the Pi. OctoPrint feeds the lines of GCODE directly to the printer firmware as the printer prints. It uses line numbers and monitors the printer's responses, so it can re-send missed lines automatically.

[lakester]

OK..., cool. It has both options. Thx!

I don't know if it's better than a PC. I guess it depends on the software.

OctoPrint has the ability to upload to the printer's SD card, but most people just print directly from the Pi. OctoPrint feeds the lines of GCODE directly to the printer firmware as the printer prints. It uses line numbers and monitors the printer's responses, so it can re-send missed lines automatically.

[jimc]

its better because there arent ton of background processes going on in the operating system that can disrupt the stream of gcode. the pi will be a dedicated computer with the only svc running is octoprint.

[clough42]

In general, though, the reason most people use OctoPrint is because it puts the printer on the network so you can start jobs and monitor progress remotely, and it does this with a very inexpensive Raspberry Pi.

This is especially awesome if you have several printers.

[CalifDan]

I am having a minor little problem. Maybe self induced...probably self induced. I got all excited about building my next Makerfarm about 6 months ago. I got all the parts including the Bulldog, E3dv6, and the raspberry pi and associated stuff. And then life got in the way.

I got back to it a few weeks ago and have much of the Makerfarm printer together. A few days ago, I decided to wade into the Raspberry Pi and re-read this forum. I don't have an HDMI monitor, but I do have the little 320 x 240 mini monitor that attaches to the Raspberry Pi. I also have a little keyboard and the wireless adapter.

I got this up and running without too much of a problem. Keep in mind, the Pi is running separate from the printer at this point. I am able to Putty into the Pi. I did all the updates and upgrades. I can see Octopi in the browser. I have made the lan address on the Pi fixed.

What I am having trouble with is the Camera. I ordered one of the Raspberry Pi cameras. It is plugged into the appropriate connection and I have even tried two different connectors.

When I boot the Pi, it goes through every thing but it does not find a camera. I get the message that the camera was not found and will try again in two minutes.

I am either missing something really simple, or maybe the camera is bad out of the box. Any suggestions on where to start? I have reviewed this thread and while I found a similar problem, I am not sure I saw a solution.

[PyramidDave]

I had some trouble with the raspberry pi camera at 1st. My 1st problem turned out to be using a browser that does not support Mjpg-Streamer. When I switched from IE to firefox that problem went away. Here is the link again that describes that problem https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/v...=8659&start=25
Another problem I had was using a slower wireless connection. I had video with the slow wireless connection, but it was choppy.

If you are using Internet Explorer for your browser, switch to Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera & see if it works.

[CalifDan]

Thanks. Worked on it early this morning and found the issue. I got the Pi with a TFT monitor. I set up the Octopi image (without the camera attached the first time) and then added the recommended packages to run the TFT monitor. Once I had that running, I plugged in the camera and it would not work.

This morning, I reflashed the sd card with Octopi and booted with the camera already attached (as well as the TFT monitor). Surprise....the camera works. So I went ahead and set up Wifi (no problem) and then I went through the process of setting up the TFT monitor. The camera stopped working. It appears that the code to add the camera either interferes with or removes the code to run the camera. Or, the TFT and the camera do not work together.

So, I went back again, reflashed Octopi, configured and set up Wifi. All is working now.

The TFT screen is not necessary, either to set up the Pi or for ongoing operations. When I bought it all, I thought it might be necessary to set up the Pi. You don't even need an HDMI monitor. I just hooked it up to my lan and then found the ip address from the router. Then I used Putty to log into the Pi. I was able to do everything necessary right from there.

Octopi loads in the browser. I can't test the connection to the printer until I get it hooked up.

Next steps will be to finish up the new printer with the Pi included.

[dacb]

That's great to hear that you got it working, Califdan.

As a datapoint, I recently did a Pi2 test and installed a stock image, the octoprint source and mjpg-streamer via git and then added enough service files to get the webcam and flask app to start up. I had to make one change for the USB camera to make it work in the mjpg-streamer config. Unfortunately, I didn't make a note of it but it is a known issue with the pi2 and the USB camera output mode.

In the end, it really isn't worth using a Pi2 on this. The PiB is more than enough to handle the modest demands. I have heard that people using Cura on the Pi to do slicing have seen significant performance improvements, but to be honest, slicing on the Pi never seemed useful to me. I'm always doing rotations and multi-piece repacking and the GUI on my Mac was preferred for this kind of activity.

So, in the end, I went back to a standard Pi model B and reinstalled from the octopi distribution.

YMMV, but I'd say, don't bother with a Pi2 for this purpose.

[kd7eir]

I tested OctoPrint with my Pi2 as well. It certainly loaded the web interface very quickly, but the actual operation was really no different than with my Pi B+. I kept the B+ for OctoPrint and use my Pi2 for other tasks.