If you are using the Raspberry Pi and don’t always have a WiFi network available, there is a great solution to this. Kenneth Jiang wrote a great set of directions for setting up the Pi and OctoPrint for just your situation. On boot, the Pi will look for known WiFi networks to log on to. If no known WiFi networks are found, the Pi will automatically set itself up as a WiFi Hotspot. You can then access OctoPrint from any computer by just logging on to the Pi’s hotspot. No need to add a touch screen and no need to run the GUI on the PI (which consumes a lot of resources, slowing down the Pi).
Here are the instructions for the Automatic Pi WiFi HotSpot. The first part of the article is just help in setting up OctoPrint for normal WiFi networking - you can skip that part if you’ve already got it working on an existing WiFi network. Scroll down about 1/3 of the page to find the section titled “Turns your Pi into a Wi-Fi hotspot, automatically” and follow the directions there.
I’ve used this when transporting a 3D printer among different classrooms. It works flawlessly. When we’re at a school where I’ve already put in the WiFi log-on info, it connects automatically. If I’m in a place where there is no WiFi (or the school where the IT guy refused to give us the WiFi password), the Pi just sets up it’s own Hotspot, with no intervention from me.
NOTE: the autohotspot is NOT dependent on OctoPi to work. It should work on any Raspian-Jessie installation.
EDIT - the WiFi hotspot instructions have been confirmed to work on OctoPi 0.13 and 0.14 (which were based on Raspian-Jessie-lite). It does not work on Raspian-stretch based systems. Stretch has changed some of the networking files and directories. OctoPi 0.15, the version currently in development, is based on Stretch, so the WiFi hotspot feature will not work on it. The author is aware of the problem. Hopefully, he’ll do an update when OctoPi 0.15 is released.