Hello 3D Printing Friends! Today on the BV3D channel
we'll learn how to print directly from PrusaSlicer to an OctoPrint
connected printer!
Stick around and we'll get into it right after this!
I'm Bryan, and YOU are watching BV3D!
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Okay, so today we're going to learn how to use PrusaSlicer
to go from "slice" to "print" in just a couple of clicks.
In previous videos, I've shown how to install and configure
the OctoPrint 3D Printer control software on a Raspberry Pi single
board computer, to give you an AMAZING amount of control over
your printer, all from a simple interface in your web browser.
Before OctoPrint, getting from your slicer to your printer involved
a bunch of steps. You'd have to slice the model, get up from your
computer and go over to your printer,
remove the storage card from it, come back over to the computer,
insert the card into a reader, save the sliced G-code file to the card,
eject the card from the computer, remove the card from the reader,
go BACK over to the printer, insert the card. navigate through the
printing menu on the printer screen and select the file, and FINALLY start printing.
After OctoPrint, getting from your slicer to your printer was a lot easier.
You'd slice the model, save it to your desktop, open your web browser,
go to your OctoPrint page, drag the file from the desktop into the browser,
and click print.
But--and this is something that I don't
think a lot of people know--you can make it EVEN EASIER with PrusaSlicer.
You can click Slice Now, then click Send to Printer, and click OK,
and that's it!
Three clicks and you've started the print. So how do you do it? I'll
show you, but first a bit of important information. The current
version of PrusaSlicer has this concept of "physical printers."
This is a way of defining the printer's network settings independently
of its other settings.
Say you had a small printer farm with four 3D printers, and they all
had the same hardware configuration. Let's say they're Enter-3 v2 printers,
each one connected to its very own Raspberry Pi running OctoPrint.
In this scenario, you'd have one Ender-3 v2 preset with all your
settings. Customized starting gcode,
customized retraction settings, and so on. You would also have four
physical printer presets, one for each OctoPrint-connected Ender-3 v2.
So why would you want that, instead of just four separate
printer presets? Because it lets you keep your printer presets
in sync.
In this example, we've got four of the same printer, but they all
need the same settings because they're all exactly the same.
If you change your starting gcode on the Ender-3 v2 preset, because
you want the bed to preheat before the nozzle heats, up you only change
it in that one preset. The physical printer presets inherit that change.
The thing that's different about the printers, that is their networking
information, is kept in the four physical printer presets.
Admittedly, this makes less sense in a situation where you have just
one OctoPrint-connected printer,
or if you had a lot of OctoPrint connected printers, but none of them
were the same. Because in that situation, you end up with two
presets for each printer connected via OctoPrint. One preset with the
network settings, and one with all the rest of the settings.
Anyway, I went through that explanation so you'd know why PrusaSlicer was
doing what it was doing, and why you might possibly end up with a
somewhat cumbersome collection of system presets, user presets, and
physical printer presets in the printer pop-up in PrusaSlicer.
So here's how to set this up.
From the Printer pop-up menu, select the printer preset that
you want to use. For me, this is my Longer LK5 Pro. Click the gear
icon next to that pop-up menu, then select Add Physical Printer
in the Physical Printer dialog box.
Give it a name. I'll call this one Longer LK5 Pro via OctoPrint.
Make sure the host type is set to OctoPrint. In the Host Name, IP,
or URL field, enter that information.
On my network, the OctoPrint instance that's connected to my LK5 Pro is
named longer.local, and that's what I connect to in my web browser, so
I'll type that here. If you know the IP address for your OctoPrint instance,
you can enter that instead. You can also try using the browse button, but
that doesn't work well for me any longer. It used to. I don't know why,
but it doesn't see newer versions of OctoPrint. The version of OctoPrint
that I'm using with the LK5 Pro is version 1.6.1, and I have version
1.5.1 of OctoPrint on another printer, and neither of those
shows up in the list. But versions 1.42 and earlier DO seem to show
up, so maybe PrusaSlicer ignores OctoPrint instances newer than
the 1.4 series when it's scanning.
Anyway, sorry, I went off on a
tangent. You also need an OctoPrint API key, which grants PrusaSlicer
access to communicate with your OctoPrint instance. And you'll get
that from OctoPrint. Connect to your OctoPrint instance in a
web browser, and click on the wrench icon to get to settings.
OctoPrint has a Global API key, but the Global API key feature
won't be in OctoPrint 2.0 when it comes out. User-specific
application keys will be used instead, so it's probably best
to use those instead of the Global API key. To do this,
click Application Keys in the Features list. In order to
manually generate an application key, you'll need a named user
in your OctoPrint instance.
Creating a named user is something that happens when
running the initial configuration
wizard in OctoPrint. If you didn't do it, then you won't
see this "Manually generate an Application Key" section. If you're
in this situation, you'll use the Global API key instead.
Now be patient, we'll get to
that right after I cover getting an Application Key.
In the User pop-up menu, select the user the key will belong to.
The key will allow the same level of access to OctoPrint
that the user has. In the Application Identifier field,
type PrusaSlicer, then click
the Generate button. An API key is created. So click here to
copy it to the clipboard, and then click the Close button.
For those of you stuck using the Global API key, click API
in the list, then click here to copy the Global API key.
Okay, whichever way you got a key, you now have it on the
clipboard. Back in PrusaSlicer,
paste that key in here, and click the Test button to make
sure PrusaSlicer is able to communicate with OctoPrint.
With everything working, click the OK button to close the
dialog box.
Congratulations! You have
successfully connected PrusaSlicer to OctoPrint!
And now that PrusaSlicer can talk to your printer
via OctoPrint, let's make use of this newfound efficiency!
Make sure you've got the physical printer selected
in the Printer pop-up menu.
Bring in a model that you want to print. I'll use a
CHEP cube because they don't take long to do. Click Slice
Now, and when the slicing is done, the button changes to
Export G-code. Don't click that, but instead click this little G
button that appears right next to it. If you want, you can
change the name of the file that will be sent to OctoPrint.
If the Start Printing After Upload checkbox is checked, clicking OK
will upload the file, and
immediately start the printing process. And there it goes!
I hope you liked this PrusaSlicer tip. Printing
with OctoPrint took a process that was about 12 steps long
and cut it down to about six.
Connecting PrusaSlicer to
OctoPrint takes that six step process down to only three.
So now, printing is as simple as Slice, Send, and Done!
Well 3D Printing Friends,
that's about all the time we have for this episode!
And now that we're at the end, let's go print something cool,
and do it in the fewest number of steps possible!
Hey, real quick before you go, I wanted to say, "Thanks!" for
being one of the Super Awesome People who sticks around all
the way to the end, and thanks for all the likes, comments,
and shares.
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Well, that's it for this one! Thanks again, and I'll see you
next time, here on The BV3D channel.