Raspberry Pi Camera/Print Monitor Setup?

I’m controlling a mini2 with Cura on dedicated Windows 10 machine.
So, I don’t anticipate a need for Octoprint remote control and wireless control seems risky anyway. However, I do want to stream video from Rasberry Pi camera to iPad and/or iPhone. Anyone doing this? Any advice helpful.

I have found it VERY helpful to be able to kill prints that have gone VERY WRONG remotely. :blush:

Plus the first week I had Windows 10 it rebooted in the middle of a 3 day long print! :imp:

RPI control ever since.

I never liked the idea of opening a possible hole in my firewall to view the prints outside of my local network.

Voices of experience always helpful …

Plan here is to not run prints when away from LAN. RasPiCam and
Mini are in basement. So, just wanting to take a look at a print’s progress when upstairs and can still jump downstairs when things go awry.

If the Raspberry Pi is a recent model, why not install OctoPi / OctoPrint on it. The software to control the camera is already included, OctoPrint has a time lapse capability (and there are plugins like Octolapse that extend time lapse functionality).

Windows 10 is not designed for dedicated real-time control and it can fail miserably at it.

OctoPrint doesn’t control the printer wirelessly, it is attached with the USB cable. You use any browser to start and stop prints, monitor progress, etc. There are even plugins that allow monitor/control from smartphones and tablets. You connect the RPi to your local network either wirelessly or wired.

Since the RPi camera is controlled by a separate thread and has dedicated URLs to access it, you could just use that part of OctoPi and ignore the OctoPrint part. Otherwise, there are many videos and howto guides available on the internet. Google is your friend.

I’ll second that suggestion – use octoprint, and ignore what you don’t need in terms of functionality.

Windows 10 is a miserable, absolute fail when it comes to 3D printing - short of disconnecting it from the network, there’s no way (unless you have Window 10 Enterprise and an IT staff) to make it stop downloading and updating at the most inopportune moments.

OK
I’ll give it a try and update on success!

All Go here. Still running CURA direct from PC. Guess I need to research the issues mentioned with Windows10. Not understanding how that will be revealed in poor prints. Thanks for suggesting I Octopi!

WRT Windows 10 issues – per other posts on this forum, expect the following possible events:

  • Blobs and similar print quality aberrations caused by Windows “pausing” USB communications while it’s busy doing something else other than Cura’s USB comms (i.e. the printhead stops moving as MARLIN is waiting for the next block of data to appear with the next gcodes to execute)

  • Prints that stop and fail completely in mid-print (or, since Murphy’s Law applies to situations like this, it may be more likely that this failure occurs around hour 23 in a 24-hour print!) – resulting from Windows doing something that causes Cura to shutdown or crash. This could be a Windows update that reboots the machine, or it could a Windows update that changes something that causes Cura to abort, or even an update that runs Windows out of memory temporarily, or whatever

The issue is that Windows 10 is doing significant stuff now in the background – and new with Windows 10 is that you have less control over this activity than you used to. One would theorize that with the exception of the updates that result in reboots, you might be able to mitigate this if you have a lot of CPU and memory to spare, so I would imagine that one of the new 6-core machines, with 32GB or 64GB of RAM may have less of an issue than the machines I tried to use (Intel-I7 Dual-Core with 8GB of RAM for the biggest of the two I tried).

Thanks!

Great to know.
I’m a longtime Mac user. But run my CNC from Windows10 and old laser cutter from WindowsME!

Not yet understanding the process of getting gcode into RasPi’s SSD or onto the Mini’s SD. For me, SSD and SD media seem potentially flaky hardware issue.

Will read more.

The Raspberry Pi normally boots from a microSD (or SD) card. This card is also the / (root) partition. OctoPi is configured with a single user, Pi, and a default password which you will need to change.

OctoPrint is a collection of processes that run under the Pi user. Interaction with OctoPrint is primarily through a browser usually on another machine connected to the server running on the RPi. On the home page there are three sub-frames on the left side, Connection, State, and Files. At the bottom of the Files sub-frame is an Upload button. This is how files get loaded.

Connect to your print using the Connection sub-frame. Select the file you want to print and using either the little icons with each file or the Print, Pause, Cancel buttons at the bottom of the State sub-frame is how you start printing.

The right side of the home page has tabs at the top and mostly control and/or monitor the operation of the printer.

There are many plugins available for OctoPrint to enhance or replace the interface. You can also use SSH to connect to OctoPi and do “Linux” things. Login as the user Pi and the folders used by OctoPrint are available.

The SD card on the Mini is a separate device and is not normally used. While OctoPrint has a button to upload to the SD card, it goes through the USB serial interface and is very slow. What might be on the printer’s SD card are calibration or setup type gcode files that almost never change.

There’s a module for Octoprint Anywhere with an interface that lets you see your webcam online. I think you can also disable the remote cancel printing feature (that’s really important).

My friend was also able to read the simple parts and info and set up to just stream the cam details - I know plenty of makerspaces have a live print cam with no control as well.

I wouldn’t say “is quite complicated”. Maybe “can be complicated” but there are numerous articles, videos, etc. available as well as the OctoPrint forums, https://discourse.octoprint.org/ to get you through it. I had no issues with mine.

Admin edit: removed spammy link from quoted spam post. Thanks for the help!