How to Add an OctoPrint Touchscreen to Any 3D Printer (Ender 3 + Others!)

[Music] welcome back in this how-to episode I'll teach you how to add a touch screen to your 3d printer for use with octo print a touch screen will allow you to manage your prints without needing to open up your computer or phone and as a bonus this project will also make octo print responsive or mobile friendly making things even easier to do from your phone now you can use this guide to add a touch screen to any octo print compatible 3d printer as an example I'll be adding one Smike reality under 3 in the video description you'll find a link to the full text and photo based version of this guide as well as links to all the tools and materials that you'll need now before you get started you'll have to choose your touchscreen any touch screen that will work with the raspberry pi will work with octo print but some are easier to work with than others I recommend choosing a small screen that connects directly to your raspberry PI's GPIO header you don't need a large screen since the octo print plugin we'll be using is designed for very small screens I use this 3.5 inch screen from Adafruit if you prefer a larger screen the official Raspberry Pi 7-inch screen will work great to some larger displays require a separate HDMI and USB connection which can make configuration setup more difficult so I recommend one that connects directly to the Raspberry Pi now the touch screen I use cost $45 on Amazon this is slightly more than some other similar screens but the benefit is the quality and ease of use that Adafruit is known for you can also find cheaper generic three-and-a-half inch touch screens in the $30 range on Amazon but configuring the screen may be more difficult and many require the use of a stylus now that you have your screen you'll need to print a case for your touchscreen in general there are a few different types of 3d printable touchscreen housings now the exact housing you choose will depend on the size of your screen the screen manufacturer your printer and how you want to attach it to your printer so you can search Thingiverse for touch screen models to find one that fits your needs for my under three I'm using an excellent model made by designer tronic it mounts directly to the printer itself and also houses the Raspberry Pi I'll link to that model in the video description now if you're using the same display that I am and you just want a free-standing mount that sits on your desk I recommend checking out this great by the Ruiz brothers from Adafruit and they're the official Adafruit 3d print crew who coincidentally I went to high school with now if you haven't already you're gonna need to install octo print most people watching this video have probably done that already but if you haven't I have a great video and guide on that okay now we're gonna connect the touchscreen to the Raspberry Pi if your touchscreen mounts directly to the GPIO header as mine does then we'll need to connect and configure it if your octa print setup uses a camera now is a good time to attach the cameras ribbon cable to the pi before connecting it to the screen then carefully push the screen onto the Raspberry Pi GPIO header for the under three the support model you printed is used in place of standoffs now these standoffs help to hold the screen securely to the PI but if your screen itself came with some standoffs and I want to go ahead and use those instead some screens don't take up the entire Raspberry Pi header that's okay that just means they're compatible with older Raspberry Pi models too now we recommend before proceeding that you backup your raspberry PI's SD card that way if anything goes wrong it's easy to revert it without needing to reconfigure everything you can use our Windows or Mac guide for backing up your SD card from the video description we're gonna use a plugin called touch UI to make octo print mobile friendly and responsive so it displays well on our small screen so go ahead and put your SD card back in your Raspberry Pi and boot it up and then visit octo print in your browser by going to http octa-pie dot local if an update message appears go ahead and update octo print now all these steps may take some time depending on your network speed so I'm gonna go ahead and speed the video up here so you don't have to wait okay now we're gonna install the touch UI plug-in so go to settings which is the little wrench icon and then select plug-in manager and then you're gonna click get more and then search for touch UI and then install it and restart when you're prompted okay next I recommend updating your Raspberry Pi that way when we go to install our screen everything will go off without a hitch so open up terminal on Mac or command prompt on Windows and connect your Raspberry Pi using the following command SSH PI at occupy enter the default Raspberry Pi password if you haven't changed it which is raspberry all lowercase okay use this command to update everything sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade yes and then enter your password okay this will take some time to run depending on how fast your internet connection that your PI has is okay once that's done go ahead and reboot your pi with sudo reboot okay so after it reboots go ahead and reconnect alright so now we're going to go ahead and configure the touch screen so if your touchscreen connects via a GPIO like mine does then we're gonna need to tell it to output video to the touch screen instead of to the HDMI port we also need to tell it to use the touch screen input as a mouse so if your touch screen came with configuration instructions use those to get things working if you're using the same touch screen as me or a similar one then you could use adafruit's touchscreen configuration script by following these steps we're gonna want to run CD user directory and then we're gonna run this w get command and this will actually go ahead and retrieve the shell script that's gonna run the setup for us now again in the video description you'll find a link to the full guide that has all these commands in it so you don't actually have to type them out of this video next we're gonna go ahead and make that script executable and then we're gonna run it okay so this will bring up the Installer and you're gonna want to go ahead and select whichever one you're using so we're gonna select option 4 because we have the three and a half inch screen now for rotation for this screen that I'm using you actually have to rotate it 270 degrees so the screen isn't upside-down but that might vary based on the screen you're using and how your how your heart your housing itself is oriented but it's easy to change the rotation later on there's a link in the full guide if your screen is upside down at the end so go ahead and select option 3 for 270 degrees okay and this will take a few minutes to run okay so when you're asked if you'd like the console to appear on the on the display enter an for no and then when you're asked if you'd like the HDMI display to mirror the pi TFT display enter yes okay so go ahead and reboot when it's done so go ahead and reconnect to your PI once more now what we need to do is we need to configure the Raspberry Pi to boot to a browser automatically so what octa-pie actually is is a website that's running on the Raspberry Pi and when you connect to it from your computer you're basically just connecting to that website directly from your computer so what we want is when the Raspberry Pi boots it'll automatically open up a web browser and it'll go to octa-pie dot local just like you would from your computer and since the outputs being mirrored to the display now we'll be able to see the octa-pie dashboard on our Raspberry Pi screen and then of course we'll still be able to access it from our computer so in order to do this we're gonna use this touch UI boot to browser script so enter this the following command and this will actually clone the touch UI autostart script repo and then after that's done we're going to run the install script inside of there ok this will take a few minutes ok after that finishes running go ahead and enter your octo print username not your Raspberry Pi one and then go ahead and restart octo prints ok so that should be it so after october int reloads you should be able to see octo print on your touchscreen ok I did run into one small issue when I went and tried to use the touchscreen I wrote estat was rotated so it seems that for some reason the Adafruit script that rotated the screen even though that worked when you would tap the screen like in the bottom right corner it would actually make the tap appear in the top right corner so like the screen was rotated 90 degrees or something so I have a fix for this in the full guide I'm gonna run through it very quickly here but it seems like a lot of commands I'm gonna do quickly so just use the full guide if you have that issue okay first you're going to install X input alright I already have it installed now you're gonna use this command to find your device name and this is the name we're looking for so it's the virtual cor pointer which is like a mouse and then you have a slave pointer so if you're using the same Adafruit touch screen as me just go ahead and use this one so once you have that you know save this output somewhere like a screenshot then we need to create a touch UI calibration script so to do that we're gonna run this command this is the command i used up there so in that full guide I have these listed out but you're basically gonna want to add one of these three lines and what this does is it has your device name here so replace that if it's different and then these are the rotation coordinates again just use the full guide in my case I'm gonna want to use this first line so I'll just remove these other ones ok and then save and now reboot so once more use the full guide these are listed step by step if you try to use this video or like type these commands you know that'll be craziness so I don't recommend that so after the Raspberry Pi reboots everything should actually work perfectly and then we're just gonna do one last step which is calibrating the touchscreen which is kind of a fun one okay so after reconnecting to your PI run this command and this will put it into calibration mode and then on the screen itself five crosshairs will appear and just tap each one as carefully as you can using some kind of plastic tool not a metal one so like a stylus or I don't know like a plastic pen or something and then when you're done it'll automatically return to the main screen and then you're done with the software a bit so now I'll show you how to assemble the touchscreen housing now again I'm using the Ender three and if you're not I still recommend watching this since most housings have a similar set of instructions and you'll see some important notes while assembling here now go ahead and insert the case into the main holder the holder is what will mount to the printer itself and to do this just slide it directly into the holder and Orientis that the thicker part of the frame is to the left just be careful because the case is very thin and easy to break but once it's assembled it's quite sturdy next slide the Raspberry Pi into the case making sure that there is a snug fit now if your touchscreen came with four were little perforated tabs on the corner you're gonna need to snap those off with a pair of pliers to make sure that the screen will fit in the case now using this 40 millimeter USB fan it's optional but recommended it's only ten dollars so I decided to do it just to ensure I always get the highest quality prints possible now connect the fan using the included screws and cover the PI side of the screws with Kapton tape to prevent shorts now I ended up shortening the USB cable for my fan to keep my step as clean as possible I don't like having a bunch of cables all zip-tied everywhere I did this by prying open the speed control switch and then desoldering cutting and restoring the cable back in place the whole thing only took a few minutes now normally a lot of fans connect directly to the GPIO header and they're powered from the PI but obviously you can't do that since the screen is there so you can go ahead and just solder it directly to a USB cable and then plug it in or you can buy one that already has the USB cable attached next we're gonna secure the backplate using the two clamps that we printed if we're not using a fan then we can use a blank back plate instead okay now we're ready to mount the assembly so remove the two screws from the lower left part of your printer I think it uses an m3 hex key and then use them to secure the new touchscreen housing okay so I ran into a small problem the fan that I used is 20 millimeters thick and when you go to mount it it actually hits right here so you can't mount it all the way so this is actually two days later I ordered a different fan that's only ten millimeters thick all right this is the replacement fan I got it was about the same price this one's only ten millimeters thick so this will work it's made by nock schewe they're actually a really great company that make these Brown fans and this is another super quiet fan so you want to make sure you choose one that is quiet so you don't have to hear it and make your printer generate even more noise than it already does so obviously the video description links to this one not the one that's too big so I'm just going to go ahead and swap it out with the back now make sure that when you put the fan in that it's blowing up so it's sucking air out of the pie instead of blowing into the pie we're good to go now the old camera mount that a lot of endor three owners use will block the touch screen so tronic was also awesome enough to remix the original camera mount into one that won't block the screen so we go ahead and just swap out the old one for the new one now you need to reconnect your power and data cables to the PI if you're powering the PI from your 3d printer then you'll probably need to solder a longer microUSB cable to your buck or step-down converter or run a micro USB extension cables such as this one I have a full guide on powering your Raspberry Pi from your 3d printer in case you're interested ok now for the finishing touch if you printed the screen surround that goes around the original screen now would be a good time to adhere it using like a little bit of blue or foam tape or something here's the screen in action so you can use a lot of the same features as you could on the computer like pausing and starting prints controlling your extruder you can see at the top here they're the same tabs that you'd normally find an acht oprand and if for some crazy reason you want to view the screen right here you can well that about does it for this video if you enjoyed it be sure to give it a thumbs up subscribe so you don't miss out on future projects and as always thank you very much watching

Channel: Howchoo

Views: 135,878

Keywords: OctoPrint, OctoPrint touchscreen, 3D printing, 3D printers, 3D printer touchscreen, touchscreen, touch screen, OctoPrint touch screen, 3D printer touch screen, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 3D printer, Raspberry Pi touchscreen, Raspberry Pi touch screen, TouchUI, Touch UI, Adafruit PiTFT, Adafruit OctoPrint touchscreen, How to add a touchscreen to OctoPrint, How to add an OctoPrint touchscreen, Add OctoPrint touchscreen, Install OctoPrint touchscreen, OctoPrint Raspberry Pi

Id: 6OP2c-GQFu4

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Survivor_Oceanic815]

No guesses needed what I'm doing this weekend. Thanks for taking time to share this. I have enjoyed a few of your past guides as well

[u/LobsterThief]

I spent the last few days making this video (and a matching guide) to help make it easier for people to add a touchscreen to their printer for use with OctoPrint. This is a great upgrade, especially if you already use OctoPrint.

You guys seemed to like my last few videos, so I thought I’d share this one too.

Please let me know what you think! I’m always trying to improve :) Thanks!

[u/IamTheDarkAgent]

Resolved all issues, now I'm just wondering if there is a way that the TouchUI screen can be scaled to fit the Official Pi 7in screen?