3D Printing - OctoPrint camera support

Another article related to OctoPrint.

OctoPrint supports to have a camera to monitor the print area, so that remotely is possible to see how a print is going on and eventually stop it if something wrong is going on.

I had around a nice Logitech Webcam C270 and it works perfectly with OctoPrint on Raspberry Pi.

So it was only matter to find a way to attach it permanently to the printer.

IntelliJ & Kotlin

Just a note about a recurring problem with IntelliJ IDEA and Kotlin, under MacOs Catalina.
Sometime appears a "Kotlin not configured" message in a Kotlin based project.

3D Printing - Updates and Problems

After some initial success prints, I started to have problems.

Basically the printer had big problems to start successfully to print the first layer, no adhesion to the plate and thus prints totally ruined.

Also, it ended up one time scratching the plate with the nozzle, sign that the leveling went berserk !

3D Printing - Adding Emergency Stop Button

Another article related to OctoPrint.

Sometime things can go wrong during a print.

If using OctoPrint to start/control a print, not always you can quickly go from the printer to the website in order to cancel the print and stop the printer.
Also using the printer console require some time to go on the stop.
Would be nice to have a Stop button.

IMPORTANT !  It is assumed OctoPrint is running on a Raspberry Pi connected to the printer !!

3D Printing - Adding enclosure temperature sensor

Another article related to OctoPrint.


Having around some DHT-22 sensors used on the fHelper MQTT project and seen a direct support of them for OctoPrint, I decided to use them to measure temperature and humidity of the enclosure, handled by OctoPrint.
In this article the steps to add the sensor to the System.

The idea is to have OctoPrint capable to monitor the enclosure temperature.
It is assumed OctoPrint running over a Raspberry Pi.

3D Printing - Slicers

A slicer is a program that convert a graphic file (typically in a STL extension) in a G-code file, capable to drive the 3D Printer.


It is a very important and critical part of the 3D printing process.

Android - how disable the Home button

Here a way to disable the Home button (but also the Back and Menu).

CAUTION !!
Possible undesired side effects !  Use at your risk !

It is assumed you know how to work on Android and I'm talking about !

3D Printing - Tests

After tests, finally found a decent slicer running on Linux and Mac : Ultimaker Cura, but I found the version 3.6.0 working much much better than the latest one (4.4.1)

Let see some print finally, after changing the bed calibration springs, re-calibrate the printer and cleaning up the printing area.

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.

3D Printing - Ender 3 Pro USB powering problem

The  problem arise when the Ender 3 Pro is connected to a computer via USB.

The connection between the two is via USB and the connection bring also the power (+5V).

In my case the computer is a Raspberry Pi 4 running OctoPrint.