Octoprint and Raspberry Pi B+

Let's get this out in the open: 3D printers make quite a bit of noise. And they run for extended periods of time. And they produce quite a bit of plastic fumes. A combination that does not fit well with having one right next to your workplace (the computer).

Luckily, there are alternatives. This weekend I went on a shopping spree, and acquired everything required to run the excellent 3D print server Octoprint on a Raspberry Pi B+ . It should run just fine on a model B as well.

My printers new home

The installation was painless, just download the Octopi image and burn it directly to your micro SD card. Plug the pi into your home network, and you're pretty much ready to print.

Getting the USB web camera to work took a bit more effort. I had to tweak the parameters to mjpg-streamer to run in YUYV mode, but after that it worked perfectly.

The server itself is accessed through a web application, accessible at http://octopi.local or just the assigned IP of your Pi. Configuration is relatively simple, and you get all the familiar controls such as temperature, homing axes and gcode loading + printing.

One cool feature of Octoprint is that you can instruct it to create time lapse photos every z-level, since it is in direct communication with the printer. This gives you some really nice videos where the object appears to be rising out of the print bed without the distracting movement of the XY plane. I will make a post with a video as soon as I have a decent one to upload.

The interface is simple and intuitive

All of these features are nice and useful, but the main benefit of this setup is that the print is unaffected by your computer. You can reboot it, crash it, kill it or reinstall your favourite operating system 3 times over without ever disturbing your 5 hour print, which is important. One mid-print crash is quite sufficiently irritating.

I did run into  a problem moving the printer into the living room; it's quite a bit colder. This, in turn, makes the heat bed struggle to keep 92°C, which has made ABS printing quite sketchy. I will have to either move the printer to a warmer location, build a hotbox or improve the power supply for the heat bed in the near future. The jury is still out on which option I will choose.

As a summary: Octoprint + Raspberry Pi is super cool and useful, and if you have a 3D printer you should consider getting this setup ASAP.