OctoPrint... thoughts?

[Farr0wn3d]

Since i'm paranoid about leaving my printer running at home all by itself in case of a problem ie: fire, I would really like to get a webcam to monitor it from my phone or from a tablet. That said, I would still need some way of controlling the printer in case of a problem, the first thing that comes to mind is a wifi enabled power outlet so that if I see a problem I can just kill the power to the printer, but I like the idea of being able control everything as well. I'm thinking that an octoprint setup might be nice, and I could still employ a wifi power outlet as a last resort.

What are your thoughts and experiences with octoprint?

[jsc]

You can set up a webcam to display directly in a tab of OctoPrint. It takes some doing to track down and compile the software, although maybe one of the distributions like OctoPi takes care of that for you, if you use the standard Raspberry Pi cam?

In general, OctoPrint is very nice and I've been using it for a long time now, but if you encounter any issues you will need to be comfortable with software in general and maybe Linux/Python in particular in order to get around it. We can help.

[Farr0wn3d]

raspberry pi sells essentially everything to get you going, including webcam, memory cards, wifi dongle, power supply, case etc. On the other hand, i'm not familiar with coding whatsoever, and even getting into the arduino firmware to adjust PID settings was a bit uncomfortable for me lol

I wish S3D had a webcam enabled web interface or smartphone app. that would be amazing. With that in mind, if I use octoprint, what does that leave left for S3D to do? the slicing?

[Farr0wn3d]

Would MatterTouch be a good option as well?

[jsc]

If you follow one of the many tutorials probably available for OctoPi, I'm fairly confident you should be able to get it hooked up no problem, but that's really up to you. OctoPrint is not a slicer, although you can embed the CuraEngine. That's not necessarily something I'd recommend. S3D generates the gcode, and OctoPrint handles the rest.

MatterTouch looks like an easy to use device that does a similar thing, but the total cost is way higher and I don't see the M2 in their list of supported printers.

[Farr0wn3d]

let me see if I have this correct, I would take the model and slice it in s3d, print to sd card, load that into octo and it would print from there?

[jsc]

You can do that, but you can also just drag and drop the gcode file into your web browser open to OctoPrint. Left side will print from the Pi's SD card; right side will upload to the SD card in the printer.

[Farr0wn3d]

and you can monitor prints with the pi webcam and control the printer while youre not home from apps like octodroid?

would you say it was worth the money and setup?

[jsc]

You can, although actually doing all of that will require digging around, unless the distributor (OctoPi) has figured out all of it for you. I don't run OctoPi, so perhaps someone else who does can weigh in on that. If you want to access it on the go, you will have to set up your network to enable that. Probably, at a minimum, you will have to configure a DNS service like duckdns.org (so you can go to a hostname that points at your external IP address, which can change depending on your ISP) and open up a port to your Pi on your router.

None of this is particularly hard, but how easy it actually is depends on your comfortability with some minor techie tasks. Also, the cost itself is minimal.

[Farr0wn3d]

If you're not running it on a pi, then what?