BIGTREETECH PI TFT50 Octoprint Touchscreen Install & First Look

over the past year bigquery tech has been releasing many high quality low cost upgrades for your 3d printer if you're looking to upgrade your printer's board or even build one from the ground up their 32 bit mini e3 or e3 turbo boards have become increasingly popular prior to that you'd be really hard-pressed to find another 32-bit board that offers the same features that these boards offer even near the price point that they're going for aside from these main boards big tree tech has released a wide range of touch screens that you can also pair with these boards or just install to your 3d printer that are really simple to install and give you a awesome way to interface with your 3d printer a little over a month ago i did a review on their new touchscreen which was their tft 50v3 screen and this was a really cool touch screen a five inch touchscreen so it was massive that i installed into the ender three and shortly after they announced yet another screen and this one is is definitely a bit different this one is called their pi tft 50. now what's unique about this screen is that it actually has mounting holes on the back of it for a raspberry pi and it's supposed to allow you to interface with octoprint and if you don't know what octoprint is i can't go into it too much in this video i've done videos on it before and i can link you in the description but octoprint is basically an awesome web interface that allows you to turn just about any 3d printer that can print over usb into a wireless 3d printer where you can have it plugged into a raspberry pi and it's awesome for just controlling one printer you can hook up a webcam and check out that printer it's got some farm 3d printing farm software so it is a really really awesome thing that i've been using for many years so in this video we're going to take a look at the pi tft50 we're going to see what comes in the box i'm going to take you through the install process which is a bit more involved than just plugging in the cables and then we will do a first look at kind of what the interface looks like and what my initial impressions are on this i hope you guys are excited and without further ado let's get right into the video [Music] every bigtreetek product that i've tested out so far has come in a very similar box to this one containing a little yellow rubber ducky and the pie tft 50 is no different aside from the main unit you're also going to find four mounting screws and a ribbon cable that will allow you to connect your raspberry pi to the touchscreen this is all that you're going to need to get this screen installed this guide also assumes that you already have a pi running octoprint if you don't have octoprint already installed then i'll link you in the description down below to a few guides that will show you how to install this and get you to the point where you need to be to follow along as for the screen installation is incredibly straightforward flip the screen over on its face to reveal the mounting points on the back align the pi's mounting holes with the holes in the back of the screen make sure that the ribbon cable port on the pi and the ribbon cable port on the screen are closest to each other when orientating the pie once you have it lined up just take the four small screws included and a tiny phillips screwdriver to mount the board down as far as the ribbon cable goes this is fairly easy to install as well you want to make sure you pull out the brown tabs on each of the ribbon cable ports before seating the cable as far as direction of the ribbon cable make sure the shiny silver pins are facing upward when installing it into the touchscreen then the ribbon cable will loop around so there was only one direction to install it into the pi these brown tabs that you pulled out will also need to be pushed back in when you install the ribbon cable to ensure that the cable is locked into place and it'll keep it from popping out [Music] the lcd screen is powered by the pi so just plug in your pi and the screen will turn on now that we have the screen installed we need to install big treetech's pi files for the screen to our octoprint install this isn't difficult but it will take quite a few steps so make sure that you follow this correctly first thing that we need to do is get the ip for octoprint install if you've been running octoprint previously you likely already know what your ip is if not you can log into your router and see the devices connected to your network it should be named octopi by default in your network and it will give you your ip address depending on your router finding out where this is might be slightly different but i can link you to a video that explains to you what is required once we have the pi's ip we're going to ssh into our pie what this means is that we're going to wirelessly connect to our pi from our computer i recommend using a piece of software called putty for this and i will again link you down below to where you can download this once you've downloaded and installed putty you'll want to open up putty and enter in the pi zp address that you just found this will then open up a window and connect to your pi in a terminal window so you can interact with your pi for the rest of the install we're going to be having the pi download files install files and allow various permissions it's not so important that you understand everything as it is that you enter it correctly i'll place all the lines in the description below so that way you can copy and paste them to make sure that they are correct when you hit open in putty a security alert is going to pop up and make sure that you just click yes on this the terminal will say login as unless you've already changed something your default username will be pi and the default password is raspberry so type in pi and hit enter follow like raspberry and hit enter again next you will need to type sudo apt update this will make sure that your octoprint install is up to date and hit enter anytime this install if it asks if you'd like to continue just type the letter y and hit enter once this portion is complete type sudo apt install xorg and hit enter once that's complete we will type sudo nano forward slash etc forward slash x11 forward slash xwrapper.config again just copy and paste this down below it's a lot easier than manually typing it and hit enter this is going to open up a page that you will need to use the arrow keys to move the cursor to the bottom where it says allowed underscore users equal console we will need to delete where it says console and just change it to say anybody once complete hit ctrl o on your keyboard to save the changes followed by enter then hit ctrl x to exit to the previous terminal window next type sudo raspi dash config and hit enter this will pull up a menu similarly to before we're going to use the arrow keys to navigate down to boot options and hit enter then we're going to select desktop slash cli and hit enter you will then want to select console auto login when you hit enter there it'll actually apply a change you can then navigate down to where it says finish to exit out of this menu there's no need to restart the pi at this point once that's done we're going to type in sudo nano forward slash etc forward slash rc.local and hit enter we will then use our arrow keys just like before to scroll down to where it says exit zero and right above that we're going to hit enter to create an additional line in that line we're going to need to add s u dash l pi dash c and then in parentheses start x dash dash dash no cursor and close parentheses again no need to type this just copy and paste it if you left click or if you control c on any of the things in the description and you go into the terminal and you just right click with your mouse it'll auto paste it so again it's really easy to just copy and paste and once you're done with that just like we did before hit ctrl o to save and control x to exit out we're getting really close to completion so just hang in there next we're gonna need to type in svn export followed by a url which again will be in the description down below it's so long that i will not be reading it off once you type that in and hit enter the last thing we need to do is type in dot space install dot sh followed by enter this will take a good while mine took somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes to complete i would highly recommend getting a coffee or doing something else because waiting will feel like an eternity trust me i waited the entire time once this is complete your screen is ready to be used i went ahead and rebooted everything when it was completed and was greeted by the big tree tech pi tft interface patch yourself on the back because the hard work is all done and you now get to enjoy your screen now that we've installed the screen and the pi we're gonna go ahead and take a look at the interface the interface is actually quite simple there's a folder where if you click on that that will allow you to browse all of your g-code files the neat thing about this folder is that it allows you to browse the g-code files that are on the sd card currently connected to your printer's main board but it'll also allow you to browse all of the octoprint files that you've uploaded to your octoprint server or to raspberry pi so let's say you uploaded files from your computer to octoprint well normally you'd have to go to your computer or to octoprint to start the next print or to repeat a print well now if you take a print off the bed you can just go ahead and select that same file or select a different file that's not on the memory card but that's actually on the pi itself and print directly from there and a third thing it allows you to do is it allows you to use a usb flash drive so if you plug in a usb flash drive into the pi you can actually navigate the flash drive and print from there which is definitely my preferred method over using the micro sd card on say an ender 3 printer the control menu is also really nice and kind of puts everything in one place you can do things like home the printer baby step heat up cool down retract restart the raspberry pi and just about everything else you would want to do from one nice little menu screen which is again really easy to use and really easy to kind of navigate the home menu will show you what the temperature is of the hot end the bed and the current fan speed you can very easily click on the bottom and bump up the hot end the bed the fan speed or the flow rate on the fly so that's really nice and simple to do now there is a button that says camera and when you click on that it pulls up a black window that has a picture of a camera and i did check to make sure that when i plugged in my webcam to the pi that was working on the octoprint server but for whatever reasoning i could not get it working or displaying what the webcam was seeing on this touch screen i reached out to big tree tech and let them know about this they got back to me saying that they're aware of this it's still a work in progress so it is currently not working at the time of making this video but it is something that they are again in development on overall i think that the screen is really exciting and it has a lot of potential especially since it interfaces directly with octoprint after testing it i do get the feeling that it's still a little bit in its infancy and that big tree tech has done a really good job of getting it to a good place and i think there is still a lot of room to grow and things that can be expanded upon i'm really hoping that big tree tech continues to develop it and i would love to see some interfacing between this screen and even potentially some of the octoprint plugins that are out there again what makes this unique is that most of the screens are just replacing the screen on your 3d printer while this is more meant to be something in addition to that that sits beside your machine and allows you to see things interact with octoprint so again i do think there is a lot of potential here and if you're looking to like if you've currently got let's say a stock ender 3 and it's got that reprap style lcd screen i do think that this can be a nice upgrade for especially the control menu and some of the file explorer capabilities but if you've already got one of their like tft 50 screens like i did a previous review on i think that it might be worth waiting until there's a little bit more development because the main thing you'd be getting really is just the ability to print um octoprint files directly from this screen so so in that instance it might make sense to wait until the firmware and this lcd screen has a little bit more features that give you a reason to want to add that on addition to the screen that you already have again i'm really hoping for big things from the screen over the next couple of months here please let me know in the comments down below if you'd like me to revisit this in let's say 30 or 60 days probably more like 60 days just to see again if they've got the camera situation figured out and if they've done any additional features big tree tech has been known to do some pretty awesome updates for their screens with the release of their new v3 screens they also had it where it was kind of backwards compatible and their older screens could also be updated to the new ui so they are known to roll out updates and again i'm hoping that this is no exception to that so anyways guys thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this video don't forget to like and subscribe for more great videos i make a video every single saturday so there's always some fresh content coming your way i really appreciate all of the support i have been getting lately and if you do want to support the channel furthermore there will be links below in the description to my patreon there are some really cool rewards there and i am super thankful to all of my existing patreon supporters i actually went ahead and created a discord channel as part of the some of the tiers so that would be a really cool way to kind of hang out and if you've got questions ask questions there as part of the patreon so on that note i hope you guys are all doing well this has been daniel from modbot and i will see you in my next video peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 37,689

Keywords: btt, bigtreetech, btt pi tft50, bigreetech pi tft50, octoprint, octoprint screen, 3d printer touch screen, pi tft50, 3d printer controller, 3d printer untethered, wireless 3d printer, octoprint plugins, octoprint controller

Id: gHa9x5cCEzQ

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020