3D Printing - OctoPrint

Many 3D printers, including the one I choose, the Ender 3 Pro, can be autonomous, meaning you simply save the file you want to print on a SD card, insert it in the printer and start the print.

However is much better to be able to monitor remotely what the printer is doing and even load remotely the file to be printed.

OctoPrint allows to do so.

OctoPrint is designed to be run also on a Raspberry Pi.
What are the advantages to use OctoPrint ?

Well, first of all the possibility to load and print a file directly, i.e. uploading it via the browser.
Also Octoprint acts as slicer, thus the possibility to simply load a stl file.
And the monitoring, including the possibility to "see" what the printer is doing.

So let start from the

Installation

To install OctoPrint of course the first thing to do is to download it.

Quite easy since is possible to download directly an image ready to be burned on a SD card.

Hardware requirements

It is suggested to use at least a Raspberry Pi 3B, so I'll look around for one of my Raspberry I have around.

Download the image, burn a SD card and then insert it in the Raspberry.
The image itself actually is less than 2Gbyte so a 4 Gbyte SD card should be enough, however having more space is better in order to store images and files.
So I did use a 16 Gbyte micro SD card.

Another hardware to be used is a camera.
I do have around an old Logitech webcam and is just working fine.
Using a Raspberry also allows to use a camera designed for the Raspberry.

Goal

The final goal is to be able to control the 3D printer remotely, to have an embed slicer and also to be able to control and monitor the environment.
Specifically the goal is to be able to :

• remotely load/prepare projects for the printer
• starts jobs
• monitor jobs (webcam)
• measure ambient temperature and humidity
• control LED lights
• control loads (fan/heater/etc.)

OctoPrint plugins

In order to better control the printer and environment, after installing and updating OctoPrint, I did install these plugins.

A note about the plugin for slice.
There are different plugin for slicers, initially I did try the CuraEngine Legacy but newer versions of Cura are not supported, so I removed it.
I then installed the plugin for Slic3r. It involve also installing Slic3r on the Raspberry.

Slic3r

See here instructions about how to install the plugin and the Slic3r program on the Raspberry.
It works but so far the results of object sliced with it are not satisfactory.
Until I found a better way to slice on OctoPrint, I decided to prepare the G-code with Cura (Cura 3.6.0) and load the G-code obtained on OctoPrint.

OctoPrint-Enclosure

This plugin requires the Raspberry Pi hooked to some extra hardware and some extra SW support is needed.
Different articles will explain what to do step by step to add functionalities via this plugin, like 3D Printing - Add Emergency Stop button.

Suggestions

Remember that the Raspberry doesn't like to turned OFF without first doing a shutdown, so avoid to do so.
OctoPrint allows you to gracefully shut down the machine, use that before to remove power to the Raspberry.