Transcript:
[MUSIC] Hey, it’s Zack from Hachoo. Calm today, We’re gonna combine two things. I love 3d printing and the Raspberry Pi computer now. If you ever wanted to control your 3d printer remotely either over your own network or over the Internet, then this video is for you. We’re gonna do this using an open source library called Octo Print. Octo print allows you to control your 3d printer remotely, watch a video feed, load prints and more now. If you don’t have a 3d printer, that’s okay. You’ll still learn something from this guide. If you’ve been thinking about getting one. Be sure to check out a review guide for the Ender 3 It’s our choice for the best 3d printer under $200 now as per the usual, I’ve created a full text and photo based version of this video, which is linked in the video description and has a link to everything that you’ll need as far as tools and materials Go and has a little bit more information than I can fit in this video. So be sure to check that out as well OK now. This is everything that you should need for your octo print setup, so you’ll want a Raspberry Pi computer. I recommend the 3 or the 3 plus you can use the smaller, cheaper, a Raspberry Pi 0 But people reported a lot of lag, which is not good for prints Loren quality, so it’s only like $35 so ID. Grab that, obviously. You’ll need an SD card. Doesn’t need to be a huge one. I have a 32 gig already, so I’m just using that you want the Raspberry Pi camera. It’s like a little camera so that we can watch our prints. You’re also gonna need a longer cable for the camera because it needs to be able to reach all the way up to the top of the z-axi’s whenever you’re printing and then you’ll need some kind of USB cable to connect the Raspberry Pi to your printer. Mine uses this mini USB port. Finally, you’re gonna want to attach everything to your printer, so you can actually just put your Raspberry Pi in a normal case and plug it in. Leave it next to your printer. If you want to, or you could print a case that will mount to your printer now. This will vary based on the printer. So I’m using a an Ender 3 and so I found this on Thingiverse comm just which, you know like a couple models to print, so this one is for the Raspberry Pi itself, and it mounts it to the aluminum channel down at the bottom. This is just a little cover for it. This is an arm that’s gonna attach the camera to the printer and focus it on the extruder. So you can actually watch your prints from octo prints and then this is actually a housing just for the the camera itself and this little attached to the arm as far as powering your Raspberry Pi. There are a few ways to do that, so you can actually just use a normal AC adapter, or if you want to, you can tap into your printer’s power supply, which is what I did, and I’ll explain a little bit more on that later. So if you’re gonna power it just from the wall, then you’ll want to grab an AC adapter as well. All right, now, we’re gonna connect all of our hardware, so the first thing we’re gonna do is connect our camera Now this the camera arm and this the camera mount, and then obviously the camera itself so first we’re gonna connect the amounts of the arm and it just kind of slides in like this right and then where I want to use a bolt to hold it in place, so I’m using an m3 by 20 millimeter metric bolt. I’m gonna use a hex key to attach it now again. This arm is for the under three specifically, but whatever printer, you have whatever you print for it to hold. Your camera will have like a similar mechanism of some kind. Okay, before we put it in the case. We’re gonna connect our ribbon cable now. I got a super long ribbon cable for mine. Its 610 millimeters long. You don’t want it too long because it’ll get caught on stuff, But depending on your printer, the the length will vary, but for the under three. This one works perfectly then. I connect your camera. You want to pull this little tab out of the Raspberry Pi camera and then slide the cable in with the blue side facing up so the blue side facing away from the lens, slide it in and then just carefully push the connector in place and not a lock. The ribbon cable finally put into the case and again. I just have these little pieces of foam tape in here to keep it from vibrating since I don’t have any screws that small. Okay, when you’re done, go ahead and attach it to the arm there you have it so now. Your camera can be mounted to the printer. All right, now, If you 3d print a case for your Raspberry Pi, there will be different options. This one amounts to the aluminum rail. And if you’re gonna do that, if your if your printer actually has extruded aluminum chassis, then you can connect this right to a rail wherever you want like. I’m doing on the under three, and you’ll need these little channel nuts. Not really, actually sure what these are called, but the printer came with a few extra ones and then. I used some metric screws from my my kit bolts. So this particular model actually didn’t surprisingly have a space for the camera cable. So if it doesn’t, you’re gonna want to just cut a notch out wherever that is and how I did that was I put the Pi in place and then I just marked with a marker, and then I used my snips to cut these. And, of course these just broke off, but that’s fine. So, um, if you have a small case like this, you’re gonna want to make sure that you use a very narrow heatsink. If they’re too tall, then they’re gonna, you know, not fit in the case or they come in contact with the case, which is really not ideal either. So go ahead and slide your raspberry Pi into its case. Now, if yours, this compact like this is a little bit tricky. So what I do is I take a screwdriver. The camera connector is the one over here. There’s an identical connector for display on the back. And if you connect it there like. I did originally, then obviously Ill. Get no video feed and that’s. Why so just carefully Pop this connector up? Don’t pop it to Harvey’s will actually come off. Then you have to push it back on its pain in the ass, so all right now. I can push my camera cable in there now. Remember the blue side of the ribbon cable faces the ports so now we’re just gonna go ahead and attach the camera arm to the printer. Just kind of snaps in place and then we’re gonna go ahead and slide the hi case into the channel on the bottom and then tighten the bolts using a hex key and finally connect the USB communication cable and the power cable to your PI. Okay, now obviously you can power your Asbury Pi by plugging an AC adaptor into the wall, but I wanted to power mine from my printer and actually wrote a complete guide on that, which is in the video description as well. If you are interested, but basically how it works is you take A step-down converter also known as a buck converter and then on one end on the you’ll attach a cable that connects taps into your printer’s power supply or connects directly to its power supply unit. Then on the other end, you cut a micro USB cable and solder it on. And then basically, you can adjust this a little potentiometer on here using a screw driver and connect a multimeter to it, and then you can tune it down so that it’ll take the whatever out whatever voltage the printer is outputting, which is usually like 24 volts, and it’ll step it down to the five volts needed by USB devices Like the PI. So, um, again, I have a separate guide on that if you want to check it out. I’ll do a video eventually. Just not yet again. I have a full guide here on how it’s you that will walk you through this process as well if you want to use it for reference, but I’m gonna go ahead and show you how to install octo print on your Raspberry Pi, So you’ll be good to go, alright? The first thing you’re gonna want to do is actually check and make sure that your printer is supported and you can do that on the octo print. Wiki chances are it is supported. I mean, there are tons of printers on here like all. The well-known ones are definitely on here, so go ahead and check that first. If you don’t see your printer on here, you can usually find one. That’s very similar, like a lot of printers are just knockoffs of other printer designs, so you can find the one that’s closest and chances are it’ll work. So this page also lists the settings that we’ll use later to actually connect the PI to the printer. All right, after you make sure that your printer works with okto prints, then you’re gonna want to download the octo print? SD card image. So you’ll actually going to use these terms? Octo print and octopi kind of interchangeably. Basically, somebody’s created a version of octo print, which actually runs on many different systems specifically for the Raspberry Pi and image of that installation is called octopi. So if you hear, you know, you’re confused between the two, they’re pretty much the same thing for the purpose of this guide. So go ahead and download the octo print. SD card image off of the octo print website on the downloads page. All right, we’re gonna use. A program called Echar to actually burn the SD card image to our SD cards. So after you put your SD card for your Raspberry Pi into your computer, then download and install it sure. So the octa-pie image is basically just a version of Raspbian, which is the official. Raspberry Pi. Operating system that’s been pre-configured with octo print. So all you have to do is install the image on the your SD card and do like a small amount of configuration and then everything old would just work. It’s kind of like if you’ve installed retropie before you just install the retro PI disk image and it’s already like setup. You can compile it separately. There are some reason you want to do this. For example, you might want to install octo print manually if you already have something else running on the SD card because this disk image will completely overwrite your existing SD card, Of course, so let’s say you use the same Pi for Retro Pi as you’re gonna use for Octo print which I wouldn’t recommend for performance reasons. Then you could install one, and then you can install this one manually, But most of the time you’re gonna want to have a dedicated PI so that you don’t have any kind of lag in your prints or anything like that. So you’re gonna want to use your own SD card. SD cards are cheap Anyways. All right, with X, You’re open. We’re gonna go ahead and select the disk image we just downloaded, Which is in my downloads folder here. I’m gonna click open, then we’re gonna select the drive, which it’s already automatically selected. So this is the SD card that I’ve connected to my computer and click continue. And then you’re just gonna click flash. It might ask for your password. OK, so looks like it’s gonna take about four minutes to flash, and then at the end, it’s gonna like do another pass to verify and make sure the data is correct. So I’m gonna go ahead and let that finish and just a quick note. Etcher is available for both Mac OS and Windows, so all the steps I’m gonna show you here are compatible with either system. All right, after the SD card is done flashing, It’ll automatically eject it from your computer, so you’re gonna want to go ahead and just plug your? SD card back in so like disconnect it and read Acta from your computer really quickly. Okay, now we’re gonna browse to the SD card on our computer so obviously like in Mac Os, you’ll use finder to go to the the boot drive is what it’s going to be called now and on Windows. He’ll just go through your like Explorer, there’s. A file in here called OCTO PRINT WP ace. I’m sorry, octopi WP a supplicant, TXT, and that’s where we’re gonna go ahead and add our Wi-Fi information, so you’ll basically put in your Wi-Fi like network name and password so that you can connect to lock your octo print Raspberry Pi remotely and obviously that’s how you have to be able to control your computer, so open this file in any text editor. I like using sublime text, but you can also use something else. Just don’t use anything like word. Anything that has formatting in it. You’ll want to use like notepad or something simple. If you edit this file with a rich text editor, then it’ll add like formatting and things in here that’ll actually screw up the file. It’s no longer a plain text file when you do that, so I recommend using something like sublime text or notepad, plus, plus or notepad, something simple, so all we’re gonna do in here is uncomment the lines where you put in your network? Ssid and Psk. And then you’re gonna go ahead and edit the put SSID here to be whatever your actual network name is. And then you’re gonna put your password in here. I’m not gonna type that right now. Obviously you’re also gonna want to go ahead and set your Wi-Fi country. This is important! I guess if you use the newest Raspberry Pi, which is the B Plus 3b Plus, So I’m in the US, So I’m gonna go ahead and uncomment that line and comment out the United Kingdom one. So this is all you lead edit here, so go ahead and save the file and then close it out and safely eject your. SD Card. Okay, now you’re gonna connect your SD card to your Raspberry Pi and connect the Raspberry Pi to your printer. Your printer will have a USB port. That’s meant for connecting like an external drive that you want to print from and so how okto print works is. It creates like a connection between the Raspberry Pi and the that USB port into your printer, and then it’ll actually be able to communicate just like as if we’re controlling it internally, which is actually pretty cool, so for some reason, mine uses this really old mini USB cable, which is the one that looks kind of like a mushroom. I don’t know why so many things still use these instead of micro USB, but it seems pretty prevalent, so just go ahead and connect a cable between your Raspberry Pi and your printer. Using whatever type of cable the printer supports and I have a list of all the tools and materials that I use on the full guide, which is linked in the video description. If you want to check those out it’s. I have some specific links to the exact cables that I use like these short ones. Okay, after you’ve connected your Pi to the printer, go ahead and put your SD card in and then connect the power and then wait a few seconds for your Raspberry Pi to boot up and then open up a terminal or command prompt, depending on what you’re using. Alright, so now we’re going to connect to the Raspberry Pi, so we can do a little more configuration, namely, we want to change the default password, so it’s a little more secure, so the on your network make sure you’re connected to the same network as you put in that that text file earlier so that you’re on the same network as your Pi and you’re gonna want to SSH into it, Which is basically a secure way of connecting to it so SSH. PI @ octo PI Dot Local is actually the the command. So the username is Pi. And the host name is octo PI dot local and then the default password is just the word raspberry, all lowercase, all right, so to change our default password. We’re just gonna type. Pa sswd type the current password, raspberry and type our new password twice. Sorry for my obscenely loud keyboard. All right, that’s really all we needed to do to connect the PI, so we can actually just open our Web browser now and browse to the address that our octo print setup is broadcasting to one our network. We’ll see the setup wizard, which is actually really easy. I can walk you through it quickly, but there’s not a whole lot for me to cover. That isn’t just obvious in the setup wizard, so I’m gonna go ahead and do it, and I’ll just make note of anything that’s important, so you don’t want to create an account with a username and a password and that will allow you to control the printer remotely. Now we’re gonna enable the connectivity check, we’re gonna go ahead and enable Plug-in blacklist processing, which keeps you from being able to install malicious plug-ins that aren’t actually like authorized by octo print, so if you want to be able to slice files directly on octopus up. But it only works with older versions of octo print. I’m sorry with older versions of cura. So we’re gonna go ahead and skip this for now. Okay, so now you’re gonna set up your default printer? I’m using the under three, and this is actually my second octo print setup, so I’m gonna put a two on there, so I don’t get confused and then the model you can just put whatever you want so reality under 3 you’re going to go ahead and put in your print settings. If you’re using the under three, I actually wrote a separate guide specifically on how to configure all this for your printer, which is in the video description, too, so be sure to check that out, but you’re gonna go ahead and put your print settings in here. Whether not you have a heated bed and your other settings that you would normally have put in Kyra and then we’re done, Just go ahead and click finish. Okay, finally, the last thing that we need to do before we can actually go ahead and start. Printing is to select the information for our specific printer. Now, if you go back to that list of supported printers and you find your printer in it, you’ll see the instructions on which settings to you. So it says to use Dev Tty USB 0 for a serial port baud rate in auto. So when we go to our connection settings here, select your printer profile, select whichever option that says on that page and then leave this at Auto. If that’s what the setting is, save connection settings and then auto connect on server startup and then click connect. And now your printer is going to go ahead and connect to the Raspberry Pi. And now you’re actually ready to print now to focus your camera. Just use the little white knob That came with the camera and turn it until it looks like it’s in focus in the control screen. Alright, now to print a file, You’re just going to click upload, and you’re gonna select your g-code file The one that you would normally generate from Keira or whatever your slicing program is click open, and then you can just select it in the side here and click the load and print button. Now it’s gonna take a minute, obviously for the printer to heat up and you can actually monitor it here, which is kind of cool and see that the bed and the extruder are starting to increase in temperature. Now all your printers heating up, you can check out some of the other cool features. The g-code viewer will show you like a layer by layer map of what your printer is gonna do, which is kind of cool. A lot of people won’t have seen this before Terminal shows the serial output from the printer. That’s connected to your Pi. And then there’s a time-lapse setting, which will actually allow you to record a time-lapse video of your print, which is kind of cool, so my printer is on the same network as I am, so I’m able to actually connect remotely over my network. So from my couch or my computer anywhere that I’m sitting like at my desk, I can control my printer now. If you want to control your printer like from work or from down the street or at the coffee shop, there’s actually a way to do this as well. I’m going to cover that in a separate video, but essentially what you’ll do is you’ll install Plugin called auto print anywhere. Now this will let you control your printer from anywhere without needing to open up a port to your network, which is great, so I will be doing a guide on this, but I’m not gonna cover this today because this video has gone on long enough, but go ahead and install octo print anywhere. It’s pretty straightforward. If you actually want control your printer remotely now, of course, you never want to leave your printer unattended. Anything can happen and fliers do happen, so I would only control your printer like from work. If say, your spouse is at home or a roommate who can keep an eye on it for you because it’s not safe to run your printer When you’re not there. No matter what printer it is now. I hope you found this video very useful. If you did give me a comment or share this video, be sure to subscribe. We do cool projects all the time with 3d printing raspberry pies and as always, Thank you very much for watching.