Something tells me I’m going to finally have to figure all these things out if I am going to be efficient with the new 3D printer. I’ve gotten rusty with all these things since I stopped teaching.
I’ve gotten a little into the weeds here about infosec as regards these things. Generally, I don’t know that it’s the sort of expertise an end user needs to foster. it’s just where some of my professional expertise lies.
1 Like
I’ve been reading up on Octoprint and it’s pretty neat. Too bad I have 20 more years to retirement. There are just so many things I want to do. I keep trying to fit it all in!
1 Like
OctoPrint is the bee’s knees. It’s such a simple, powerful idea.
It’s pretty “green” as these things go, as well. a Raspberry Pi doesn’t draw more than about eight watts even under heavy computational load. Leaving it turned on to run a 3D printer is way better than even a laptop.
I’ll have an RPi setup just for the 3D printer. Need to print me a laser case for those things someday.
1 Like
FYI: just go with Octopi rather than roll your own. I did set one up with raw octoprint, and the set of dependencies is so painful (and I run a large linux cluster at work) to get all the libraries etc all just so. Octoprint is just a simple image. I also patreon Gina since she’s awesome, and does all this now as her job purely supported by patreon.
6 Likes
Gotta second that. Octopi is just so darn simple. Download the image, put it on a card, edit the network file and go.
Oh, and other key item. Don’t even think about doing time lapses to your internal SD card. It sucks up space like you can’t believe. Get an external USB thumb (like this 128gb). I can walk you through making it the time lapse directory volume. Works great, and if it fills up, sure you lose your time lapses, but the machine doesn’t lock up in a very nasty way; ask me how I know…
4 Likes
I haven’t done the save to a network drive for time lapses, but that is what I was thinking. I have a generic Ubuntu machine that just hangs out and takes care of all my home backup needs.
Yeah, you could network mount a share from that (just make sure to remember to add it to the fstab so it is there every reboot - you do need to reboot the pi periodically to be honest). BTW the default settings for the camera are crap, you get low res (640x480) time lapses. You should upgrade to full HD at least, so you get way better quality (while useful for cool postings, HD is way, way better for diagnosing WTF just happened when you have epic fails)
1 Like
To update the camera to HD:
in /boot/octopi.txt
comment out:
#camera_usb_options="-r 640x480 -f 10"
and add at end:
camera_raspi_options="-r 1920x1080 -fps 10"
And here is the example from my lab’s config.yaml (I have a more complex one at home). This also demonstrates the cool slack plug in, so our printer notifies a slack group about status (and my home one does this too) [note: I replaced all the special things, like keys, with xxxxxxxxx]
config.yaml.zip (1.7 KB)
1 Like
Ha, I have to go the other way or else the camera uses up al the CPU power on my RPI Bs. I keep 640x480 and drop the frame rate to 4 and reduce the quality settings.
3 Likes
Ah, I converted all mine to rpi3s with copper heatsinks to allow me to run full bore…
2 Likes
I have the four Bs so they are pretty slow. Might have to take this opportunity to upgrade.
Get a 3 and get one of the little self adhesive heat sinks, since video compression/streaming is a heat generating activity.
Oh and the camera V2 has way better low light handling.
1 Like