It seems usefull. network control and monitoring of your printer. Anyone try it?
Yup! It works well. I really liked the built in timelapse functions. A couple months ago it struggled loading 30MB or higher gcode files, but recent releases are supposed to have improved it. It ran rather well other than that on the Raspberry Pi. I would recommend giving it a shot!
Time lapse…as in video?
I know it can interface with a webcam, but if you can automatically save the video as a time lapse, that is great.
I’ve been using OctoPrint with my TAZ for a week or so now. It works really well running on my Raspberry Pi (it’s even the 256MB one and not the larger Pi). The timelapse feature is really nice. I found the timelapse was really grainy due to the ultra high video compression that is on by default. If you’re interested in that feature, try setting the video bitrate to 10K instead of 5K (default) - I’ve even run it at 20K with great results. I also set my timelapse interval to take a shot every 2 seconds. For a 4-5 hour print, that results in a 70MB or so timelapse with pretty great quality.
The only Issue I’ve had (other than the slow upload of large files with older versions like Orias mentioned) is that OctoPrint can’t let you download very large timelapses. For some reason, trying to download a 70MB or so timelapse endes up causing all of the free RAM on the Pi to be exhaused which in turn forced the Linux kernel to kill the Python interpreter and that kills OctoPrint. If that happens while you’re in the middle of a print or while you’re heating the hotend or the bed, whatever was heating/heated will stay heated since the printer didn’t get a command to stop. You just have to reboot the Pi or manually restart OctoPrint if that happens, but if course you’ll lose your print if it’s actually in progress when this happens.
OctoPrint is really great software though - it’s excellent for checking on the progress of your print from an iPhone or iPad. I just picked up my Google Glass this weekend and plan to try to integrate some type of OctoPrint monitoring with Glass in the next month or so since it’s been so useful with my iPhone.
- Adam
Not the normal case, but I was able to get it working on a Windows 7 laptop. It’s really fast and doesn’t seem to have the limited resource issues. I might get a Pi to run it on later.
The python command to create the timelapse doesn’t work automatically, which is annoying, but you can always run the command in a console. Haven’t had the time to look into what’s causing the issue.
It’s really nice to be able to check on it remotely.
I haven’t tried it yet because I don’t use raspberry pi, but this would make a great application for android.
It’s really nice to be able to pop open your browser on your phone or tablet and start a print/view it. I ran into trouble getting it to accept uploads from mobile devices unfortunately, using the stock Android browser and Chrome. I have not tried Firefox yet. Repetier Server behaves the same.
I am having issues on my new taz 5 where the file wont start printing… If i try to upload from SD and start to print via octoprint (the only way to get timelapse to work is to have OP know when the z level raises) it never starts printing.
So i load it, it says it starts and the timer starts, but it never starts printing.
Any idea why that may be?
I have not used octoprint yet, but I have had pretty good results using the software from astroprint on a pi2. it also has a rime laps feature but I have not had a chance to try it out yet since I have not been able to hook it up to the Internet at my school. I just hook up to the wifi hotspot created by the astrobox and send the files to be stored locally on the raspberry pi.
I usually stream prints from Octoprint rather than uploading to the SD. Does the uploaded file start from the LCD? If not, it could be something in your slicing software…
chen, how do you stream to octoprint? i exclusively use S3D
I slice with S3D then drag and drop the gcode to Octoprint… no direct interface between S3D and Octoprint.
In S3D I tick the “Wait for hotend temperature to stabilize before beginning build” option on the Temp/Primary Extruder tab. Then in Octoprint I setup a “Before the print job starts” script to heat the bed to 50C and use the “Autoselect Last Upload” plugin. So after dragging and dropping the gcode, I just hit “Print”. When the bed reaches 50C, hotend starts to heat up to 245. Bed is at 98C-ish when hotend reaches 245C. Hotend homes XYZ and then starts the brim / skirt to prime the hotend (I try to pick enough skirt for at least 30mm before actual print starts).