13 Things

[SteveW]

Guys,

Was wandering around Youtube and found the following: 13 Things.... Apologies if it been aired before but may serves a useful intro to those like me who did a quick search here, saw nothing and moved on.

The link seems to offer a well paced intro to things to know about before starting 3D printing or just to improve.

Interestingly the host advocate a thing called Octopi as little 3D remoteable print manager and a web cam plus time lapse to audit trail the failures.

If you haven't seen it Enjoy else Enjoy anyway.

[Roger]

I've found these YouTube channels really helpful...

3D printing nerd

Maker's muse

CNC Kitchen

[atgordon]

I used OctoPI when I was trying to get my $86 TronXY printer working ...  it would run out of memory after 9-10 hours printing. Really frustrating! so I rigged up an old Rasberry Pi unit to drive it. It was very successful, but my Pi A didn't have wifi, so I ungraded to a Pi 3 (cheapest unit with wifi). It ran the printer on 40+ hour print runs without a hiccup, and it supported the small Pi camera too. Even with Octoprint, the TronXY was such a pain that I upgraded to a proper well sorted 3D printer, and I'm glad I did. 

My current printer, Ghost 4S (which I couldn't be happier with) has wifi upload so I didn't need to use the Octoprint/RPi (it doesn't have the camera though ... that would be nice since I run the printer in the workshop)

I second Roger's comment about Youtube ... I have used all the one's he had suggested in his earlier posts on 3D printing ... very useful, thank you Roger!

[Roger]

I'm pleased to see you're getting good results from your setup now.
I just use mine from an SD card without any issues. When you hook up a Raspberry Pi, presumably you have to then provide a screen, keyboard and mouse to be able to use it? Maybe you can use a phone app?

I really don't want to add all that in my already overcrowded space if that's the case. I would certainly prefer it to be WiFi enabled though. Maybe Prusa will offer an upgraded 32 bit stand alone version for mine since it's what they seem to have for the new mini version.

[atgordon]

May 23, 2020 21:07:26 GMT Roger said:

I'm pleased to see you're getting good results from your setup now.
I just use mine from an SD card without any issues. When you hook up a Raspberry Pi, presumably you have to then provide a screen, keyboard and mouse to be able to use it? Maybe you can use a phone app?

I really don't want to add all that in my already overcrowded space if that's the case. I would certainly prefer it to be WiFi enabled though. Maybe Prusa will offer an upgraded 32 bit stand alone version for mine since it's what they seem to have for the new mini version.

Hi Roger,  To setup Octoprint on your RPi system, you need a keyboard and a screen (no mouse).  My CNC mill dripfeed computer was the very temporary donor for those items since it was nearby (for the time it took to setup Octoprint ... maybe 10 minutes tops - once Octoprint has installed and been registered to your printer, the keyboard and screen can reverted to usual duties).  More info here

Once the RPi with Octoprint is setup and hooked up via the RPi/YOUR PRINTER USB cable, you do not need anything else apart from a WIFI connection and you use Octoprint application on your main computer  to transfer your files to the RPi and then onward to the printer.

Power to the RPi can be problematic: I hooked up the RPi USB power cable to a 110v phone charger, but I got repeated low power errors on the host computer during the Octoprint setup: it seems that the RPi needs almost 3A, so it can't be fed from a standard cheap plug-in USB phone charger.  I added a 5V-5A regulated power supply board powered off the main 3D printer power supply 12/24V lines ($8 off eBay), with a USB-A output.  Hooked it up to via a USB-A to USB-C cable to the RPi and never looked back.

The camera unit is the cheapest RPi camera that I could find with a 36" cable (you can get really cheap cameras with 6" cables - too short to be helpful!). ($10)

My Ghost 4S is 32-bit and WIFI equipped and uses the free CURA MKS extension to handle all the WIFI file transer duties (I suspect the firmware is tuned accordingly). If the printer is turned on, when I click on the slice button in CURA, I get a "PRINT ON GHOST 4S" option.  If I click OK, away it goes!    

It works very well, but it does mean I'm tied to CURA.  If I was very experienced, that might be a problem, but since I'm a novice, all good!

Cheers, Tony

[Roger]

Thanks for that Tony. To be honest, it doesn't really sound like it's worth me doing that then. I've got to go to the office to create and slice everything, so it would only be the transferring of the files that would be a benefit, and it seems a lot of faffing about to get that. I'll wait and see how it's done on the Prusa mini.