Hi there and welcome to the 3d printing zone. My name is Nils,
and today I'm going to be showing you how you can use a Raspberry Pi configured
with Octoprint to remotely control and add a bunch of really cool features to
your 3d printer. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Octoprint,
basically it's some software that was specifically written for 3d printing,
and it runs on hardware most commonly the raspberry PI or a version of the
raspberry PI, but it can run on other hardware as well.
And it connects directly to your 3d printer and gives you a whole slew of
different upgrades and opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise have without an
interface like this. By the time you're done with this video,
you should have all of the knowledge you need to actually be able to do this
yourself. Now to start with you are going to need a raspberry PI of some sort.
This is a 3 B plus that I'm using right here.
You can actually use the latest ones.
The four should work pretty well with them. Uh,
you can use even down to the very earliest ones.
I've got one of my really old ones here, and any of these will do the job,
just check the OctoPrint website,
which I'll put links to in the description below to check for compatibility
before you make your purchase. Now,
in case you're unfamiliar with these devices,
these start at anywhere from $10 and they go up to about, uh,
they go pretty high and you can go up to about a hundred dollars for kind of a
maxed out version four, but they started about 10 bucks plus shipping.
You can buy it on Amazon prime for $20 and have it there in a couple of days.
And again, links will be in the description below, and these are super handy,
not just for 3d printing, but for a million other things too. Now,
in addition to the raspberry PI itself, you're going to need a few other things.
They're all pretty common. You may already have most of these things.
The first one is a USB, a to USB B cable,
and these come with most 3d printers. So if you don't have one,
you can pick one up online, and again, I'll put links in the description.
The other thing you're going to need is the ability to power the raspberry PI.
And for that, it's just micro USB.
Ideally you want to have a brick that has one or two amps on it,
enough power to make sure that it's got a consistent power rate there.
And then lastly, you're going to need a little micro SD card.
This is what we're going to use for storage to actually store the OctoPrint
software on that. And we'll get into that in just a second.
I usually run a 16 or a 32 gigs on mine.
And the reason for that is if you do time lapses or save files to
OctoPrint, it's going to save them all on this little device here. So,
all right, first thing we're going to do is head over to octoprint.org.
And once there you'll see a big green download button.
So click on that and that will give us the zip file,
which contains what's called an image file that we'll use to place onto the
micro SD card. All right. So once that zip file is downloaded,
we're going to unzip that.
Now the next thing we're going to do while this is unzipping here,
you need to make sure that to have your micro SD card hooked up to your computer
so that you can see it as a drive.
And then we're going to download the next piece of software located on the
website, as it mentions here, which is called etcher.
So we'll go grab etcher and this work on any operating system,
which is really handy,
download it to unzip it and then run it just like you would with any other
application. Now with extra open, we're just going to go flash from file.
And this is where we're going to select the image that we recently downloaded
for OctoPI open. And then I'm going to select my target.
My target is going to be this right here. It's this 32 gig micro SD.
And I will select that. And then flash, we'll let that run.
This'll take just a minute. All right, once that's finished,
then you should now have the image transferred over to the micro SD card and it
should show up in your file Explorer or your navigator.
So I've got mine located right here. It says boot.
And so I'm going to find my boot drive.
Now the one file that we do need to edit on this boot drive is called OctoPI
dash WPA dash supplicant dot TXT. Now,
if you're doing this on a PC,
you want to make sure not to use notepad to do this,
but you can use notepad plus plus, or if you're on a Mac,
then you don't want to use text edit without making a couple of tweaks.
If you have a text editor that will keep everything in its pure format,
that's the best way to go. I'm going to open this in text edit.
There's a couple of changes I'll need to make sure to do inside of text,
edit in order to make sure it's not going to mess with anything here is for me
to go to preferences and I want to do plain text.
And I also want to make sure it's not using
quotes. Here we go. So if I've got those two taken care of,
then we should be okay here. So we'll go ahead and close that out.
And in here towards the middle here,
we've got a WPA dash WPA to secured.
This is where we're going to enter in our wifi network information so that the
raspberry PI can connect directly to our wifi. So,
first thing we want to do is take off these hashtags at the beginning of each
section here,
because those are essentially commenting out these lines and we want the lines
to be active. So we're going to say here,
we're going to put in the name of our network and then your password,
make sure to leave those quotes in place and then we'll hit save. Okay.
So at this point, we're going to eject our micro SD card.
We're going to put it in the raspberry PI and then get everything connected.
So first we're going to take our USB a to USB cable and connect the,
a end into the 3d printer itself. I've gone ahead and turn this on.
So this should be ready to go.
We'll connect the other USB end into the raspberry PI insert the
micro SD card. Here we go.
And then lastly, we'll provide us some juice with the micro USB.
Okay. Our little lights are turning on, so that's good.
We'll give this just a minute to start up because it's got a load, essentially,
the operating system from the micro SD card, which is Octo PI,
and then get the software up and running for OctoPrint. Now over here,
the computer and our browser, we'll head to http://octopi.local.
If you have a computer that supports bonjour services, uh,
Macintosh computers do that. For example, on PCs,
you may have to look up the IP address of your new device here.
And so you might have to log into your router and look for that new device by
IP.
You can always try the octopi.local and see if it supports it that way as well.
And I'll hit enter. I think we've given enough time, hopefully.
And there we go. Check it out. Okay. So we now have OctoPrint installed.
It's going to walk us through the setup wizard on the setup wizard.
You just want to make sure to go through each of the steps listed here so that
you can get everything set up properly.
It'll walk you through all that you need. All right,
now we're all set up and running. We've got, OctoPrint going. Well,
one thing I did after I re installed the update, I powered down the octopi,
the OctoPrint here and then installed a webcam.
So this is a Logitech C920 webcam. I really like this. In fact,
I have a couple of like this because they're full HD and they produce a really
nice image for doing time-lapses.
So you can use the control tab right here and there we go.
Now we can see what the camera sees.
So when we set this on the printer and it will produce these beautiful Octolapse
time-lapses if you install that plugin and we're going to leave it there for
today, there are so much more we can get into here,
but feel free to poke around and take a look at all the OctoPrint can do. Now,
if you want to learn more about 3d printing in general,
I've got a video called 13 things that I wish I knew before I started 3d
printing that you can check out right here,
and then you can see all of the other videos from my channel over here.
Please subscribe. If you haven't already and we'll catch you next time.