My Favorite Octoprint Plugins // 14 Plug-ins To Get Started

hey everyone it's ryan with this smart house and on today's video we're going to take a look at my favorite plugins for octoprint now if you caught my last video about octoprint you i kind of showed you what octoprint is capable of and i showed you some of the plugins that i think are essential to even get started so on today's video i'm going to take you back through a few of those plugins just so if you haven't watched that video you can see them here and then i'm going to go show you my other favorite plugins for october so if you didn't catch my last video you can see link here above on how to set up and install octoprint and get it configured so you can control your octoprint instance from home assistant on today's video i've broken them down into a couple separate categories to hopefully make things organized so i've broken them down into printer enhancements octoprint enhancements backups and the cool factor so let's take a look at the first category printer enhancements now these are going to be things that we're going to use to modify the behavior of our printer and add some additional functionality to the physical printer itself [Music] the first plugin we're going to take a look at is the psu control family of plugins now i briefly mentioned this in my last video and what this does is it allows you to take a smart plug and plug your 3d printer into that smart plug and be able to control it inside the octa print interface why this is super important is because when a 3d printer is running even when it's not printing it still runs fans still consumes energy and it's loud so this allows you to turn off all the main functions of the printer itself i'll be able to keep octoprint running so there's a series of plugins that you can choose from depending on what type of smart plug that you're going to use you can choose from a variety of different plugins that will directly interface with the control on your plug now if you have something like home assistance you can install the home assistant control and use that to control one specific element of home assistant to turn it on and off that particular so if we look at my interface here we'll click on the settings button here scroll down to psu control so there are two parts to this plugin the first being the actual psu control plugin the second one is the one that you want to select for your specific smart plug so i'm using the home assistant plugin which allows me to put in my address and access token for my 3d printer and then be able to select a single entity to turn on and off to control that now if you don't have home assistant setup if we go over to the plugin manager and we look for ph we search for psu we'll see a whole variety of different pre-built controllers so if you're using mqtt openhab you can use you can actually control it with a relay plugged into the gpio on the raspberry pi if you're using shelly tasmota tandebel tp-link or wemo you can directly interface with any of those but if you're already running a home assistant i recommend installing the home assistant one you can control any type of plug without having to go in and configure an individual provider for the psu main control you can leave most of these set by default but you do want to enable turn automatically turn on psu and automatically turn off psu and idle what this is going to do is if any of these trigger commands come from the g-code usually if you're using like cura and you want to start a print job and the psu is off if you tell kira to go ahead and send the print job to your printer and it receives any of these commands it's going to go ahead and activate the psu and turn your printer on automatically if your printer is sitting idle for more than 15 minutes or any time period you want you can have it also let you turn off the psu you can also set a wait for temperature to prevent the printer from being shut off while sitting there waiting to warm up you never want to turn a printer off when the hot end is at full temperature because you could cause issues with it not having the fans being able to cool it so make sure that you set a weight for temperature so it will basically wait for the print head to hit a certain temperature before it shuts off the power supply so the next plugin we're going to take a look at is for your raspberry pi it's called gpio fan control if you have a raspberry pi with a three pin fan connected it allows you to use that third pin to control when that fan runs so again if you're like me and you have your 3d printer in your office or bedroom or wherever it is and you don't want those fans running all the time especially when the printer isn't running so that you can turn on and off the raspberry pi fan if your printer's not running now this is especially important if you're going to have this in a hot area and you want to make sure the raspberry pi stays cool you can enable and disable the fan when the printer isn't running so which pin you're using and being able to interface with the different various g-code commands you can also allow it to the cpu to request cooling if it gets too hot it allows you to set the fan speed right here from the front of octopi so the next plugin we're going to talk about is called better heater timeout this allows you to automatically time out and shut off the bed if there's no command received this is helpful if you decided to preheat your bed in hot end to say change the filament and then got distracted went off and did something else you don't want your printer just sitting there running all the time for no reason so what this will let you do is let's let you set a timeout value that if after so many seconds there's been no new commands being received it'll go ahead and shut off the hot elements now it's got an option in here to allow a timeout so what this will do is basically every time it receives a new temperature change command it will go ahead and reset that clock or you can set it to say after heating starts wait that many seconds and then you can set the full timeout just for the bed it's a pretty simple plug-in that can be used to keep your printer safe and so it doesn't just run them up if you happen to leave it on accidentally now the final one in this category is require some extra hardware but i think it adds a really cool dimension to the printer ws281x led status now there are a number of ways of adding leds to your 3d printer it uses the compatible ws281x series of leds that are individually addressable or series addressable and allows you to not not only light up your 3d printer during print operations so you can see better from the camera it also has enhancements to show you progress and different elements while the 3d printer is warming up cooling down printing or in idle mode so it allows you to look at the printer and tell what what's happening with it at the time you can even have it do an led progress bar to show you how far along your print is going so this is a pretty cool one and if needed i can do a video about how to set up the hardware that's required for this one so if you do use any of these ws led strips you can use this and one pin on your raspberry pi to control your leds it also has a really cool feature called a torch mode or for us americans flashlight mode whenever you access the webcam it'll turn on all the leds white so you can see your print progress much easier you can also use this with a later plug-in called octolapse to have it flash the leds white when it's taking the picture for the time-lapse to give you better quality during your prints so that's it for the printer enhancements let's hop over to the next category of octoprint enhancements [Music] all right so for our next section let's talk about enhancements to octoprint now to start this section off i'm going to briefly mention a couple plugins that i showed in the last octoprint video specifically the mqtt plugin and the mqtt home assistant auto discover now these are critical if you want to be able to control and connect your 3d printer to home assistant and be able to issue control commands from home assistant back to the 3d printer and if you have if you missed that there's a link here above to my previous video and then i've got the time stamp down below where that section starts so you can skip right to it the other plugin that i want to talk about in that same video is octo everywhere and this is the ability to go out and be able to control your octoprint instance from your phone or mobile device or even their website without having to open up ports to your inside network now again i've got the timestamp here below to show you where that section starts on how to get that configured so with those two out of the way let's look at some new plugins now the first one is called themify and if you've noticed in this video my octoprint instance has been in dark mode and i love everything dark mode so this allows you to to be able to apply different themes to your octoprint instance if we go down here to themify there are some pre-built ones which you can you can find these on their github page describing which which each of them are it allows you to make some different changes so not only does it allow you to apply a theme but you can then customize that theme to your heart's content so that's a great way of making the octoprint instance your own the next one we'll talk about is touch ui now if you're going to be accessing this from say a screen that's attached to your raspberry pi or you want to access this from a mobile interface and not use the mobile app then the touch ui will adapt the interface to a large easy to you know press with the finger interface and it allows you to trigger this on and off depending on a cookie installed on your browser so it will automatically load up the first time with the touch ui but you can immediately disable it for that particular browser if you're using a desktop computer you can turn that off so if you look it's much more enhanced for smaller screens obviously it looks kind of weird on my desktop but on your mobile phone or tablet it looks a lot better it allows you to have nice large buttons that you can click on and it brings all of the controls much larger so you don't have to scroll or you don't have to zoom in to make controls and if you want to disable it for the browser you just hit the three lines at the top go to touch ui settings and then toggle touch ui off so again this is great if you're wanting to use this on a tablet or a mobile phone or again if you have a a touch display attached to your raspberry pi next we're going to talk about an enhancement to the logic of your 3d printer so if you ever notice that when you make a 3d print sometimes the time estimate can wildly vary depending on different features of the print and you may be a lot shorter or a lot longer than you originally anticipated i've had prints that have said they're going to take 12 to 14 hours they end up taking five this plugin called print time genius will do analysis on the g code and then give you a more accurate representation of the print times it'll show a separate estimate for its precise durations versus the fuzzy ones that come out of the slicer or the printer itself it also allows you to analyze your g-code and come up with a better estimate right off the bat this next one i'll briefly mention it is a paid service after the free trial or you can host this one yourself it's called the spaghetti detective now the spaghetti detective is a machine learning algorithm that will use the camera feed from your webcam and try to determine if your print is currently failing so if your print happens to move while printing and then it's just creating a large bundle of spaghetti it will use machine learning to figure out that there is spaghetti on on the print bed and pause your print job so that you can intervene with it now it is a paid service if you want to use the cloud version but there is an ability to roll your own or make your own install on a web server this will not run on something like a raspberry pi you actually have to have more horsepower than that i'm currently running this on the same server my plex server runs on and it runs pretty great so far i haven't had any print failures so i haven't been able to test it but i'll probably be doing some larger larger jobs here in the future that will allow me to test out some of the features of that we'll see how that works in the future if you're interested i could do a video on how to set up the spaghetti detective on your own server and be able to run that for free in your own environment let me know in the comments below if you'd be interested in that type of video now the last plugin is one i use very frequently and it's the telegram bot so i have telegram integrated with my home assistant so i get notifications via telegram i can also do some basic controls so if you look here on screen you'll see every time a print job starts i get a notification with a picture when the print job finishes it sends me a copy of the time lapse both from octolapse and from octoprint and i get commands whenever the printer starts up or shuts down begins printing if there's any failures or things like that i can also type in a slash help command and be able to do different things via just my telegram messenger so i can actually upload gcode file i can stop or pause a print i can request a gif or a super gif a longer gif of the current video happening i can modify settings i can turn on or off the printer's power supply unit i can see progress i can tell to shut up or don't shut up send me the current status all sorts of really great things that you can do from the plugin sends it to you automatically you don't even have to open up the app or go to the web page so super powerful super cool and the setup isn't too difficult so i recommend this one highly if you're gonna be doing print jobs and you're not gonna sit there and monitor the printer the entire time i might do a short video here in the future on how to set it up it is pretty simple you do have to know how to create telegram bots but the instructions are pretty thorough on their github page and it is very simple to set up a bot but if it's your first time it may be a little more difficult again this is something you want me to do a short video on let me know in the comments below alright so that's it for our octoprint enhancements now the last couple categories we'll go through fairly quickly [Music] so in this second to last category we'll quickly show you some enhancements for backups now if you know me i'm all about taking backups i did an entire video how to automatically back up your home assistant instance using google drive and i love being able to have automated scripts that are going to back up my stuff and put it out someplace so i don't have to worry about it in case i have a failure and this is super important to me because i ended up shattering one of my sd cards trying to force it into a into a 3d printed case that was warped slightly and i lost my entire octoprint instance and i hadn't backed it up so now i am religious about backing up my octoprint instance so the built-in function in octoprint allows you to do backups but they can't be scheduled and they only back up to the sd card and then you have to download them to your computer so i'm going to show you a couple of quick plugins that will allow you to automate this function the first one being backup schedule now this allows you to do daily weekly monthly backups or you can do a backup every time octoprint starts up i recommend doing weekly backup unless you're making a lot of changes periodically in your system but you can tick this box and it will go ahead and schedule a backup automatically of your octoprint instance and you can also tell how many you want to retain so if you want to retain four backups and you can also tell it to exclude your time lapses so those don't take up a lot of room or your uploads if you don't care about keeping the g-code that you've uploaded to your 3d printer so with that set up now it'll automatically generate that backup but again now that backup is still only on your sd card it's not being replicated out outside that's where this other plugin comes into play this plugin is called simply called google drive back now what this allows you to do is create a backup and have it exported to your google drive and it does tell you along with the other one it's not going to monitor your storage so if you do run too many backups and you fill it up it's just going to error out it's this one's a little bit more complicated to set up than some of the other ones because you actually have to generate a client secrets.json but if you go to the documentation github it steps you through how to do that so as you can see if you go to their website it tells you how to generate this client.json to be able to set up a backup so this again may be something that might be a little more complicated than you want to deal with but it's really not that difficult if you've generated these type of of client keys before for things like home assistant but once it's set up it's one of those kind of set it and forget it and then you have automated backups that are taken off-site in case your sd card fail i do recommend taking your backups and setting them off site either using a plug-in like this or having a manual process where you download it and place it in your google drive [Music] so for our last category we'll talk about one of the coolest plug-ins that you can use to make awesome time lapses and that's called octolapse this is a plug-in that everybody knows about that uses octoprint and they've baked in some simple time lapses and i'll show you a difference between the two timelapses that you get from the built-in one versus the one from octolapse obviously time-lapse is only really good if you're going to print a taller object because it's something that you need to be able to see or if you have a higher angle you'll look down on the object being printed so if we look at this first example this is a time lapse that's being created by the built-in octoprint time-lapse function now if we watch this you'll notice the print head is moving because every time it makes a z-axis increase it changes the z-axis it takes a picture which is pretty cool it makes a nice video anyway if you use the octal apps version it sets the print head to the exact same position and it gives you this really cool kind of creation shot that is not available in the built-in one it's a little bit more complicated but the setup is pretty easy and it will only take a picture when that printer head is in the same position so it gives you this kind of growing effect versus the you know the actual movement around this is great again for tall objects if you're doing a wider object that's shorter and you still want to take a time lapse then i recommend going ahead and doing both time lapses in octal apps and in the octoprint time lapse it doesn't really add much it just creates two videos instead of now this plugin is pretty powerful it has a ton of options in it and it even sets up a link in your header but this allows you to create a variety of different options in your octal app so for example you can set which printer you have you can set what type of stabilization you want so you could do all sorts of different positions so i have mine centered so it's going to center it over the object so every time it goes to take a picture it's going to move the printhead into the center take that picture you can also have it set it to a different position on the printer you can have it move it out of the way entirely or you can have it do an animated orbit where the print head moves into a different position so it gives you a nice orbit effect during the print out you can select what type of frame rate you want if you want 30 frames or 60 frames a fixed length video or you can have it do you can also you can also customize how it's triggered so there's a ton of options in here that you might want to dig into every time you start a print job it'll pop up a window asking you to confirm the time lapse plan so it'll let you make those tweak those settings per instance and i've got mine set to automatically time out after 15 seconds so that way if i'm not at the interface it doesn't wait for me to to accept the new time lapse as it goes forward this one is super cool it gives you a lot of really neat features to make those awesome time lapses that you see a lot on youtube and obviously with those with good lighting and great camera position you can make some cool time lapses automatically for your printer hopefully you've enjoyed this overview of some of my favorite plugins with octoprint so far now i am a relative noob when it comes to 3d printing and 3d printing plugins and octoprint but these are i've done some research i've read some different blogs watching different youtube videos and these are the ones that i find the most helpful now one of the things with all plugins they're being maintained by specific developers so if you really like a plug-in i recommend that you thank those particular developers or support their projects and there are some times where these plugins will be abandoned and so if that particular that happens in the future i might do an update video showing some of my the plugins that i like at the particular time or replacements for old ones if you have a favorite plug-in please leave it in the comments here below and i'll be happy to check it out i think there's a great community behind octoprint there's some great enhancements and features that you can add to an old printer for nothing so thanks again for watching this video if you want to see more content about 3d printing let me know in the comments below or feel free to join our discord server to ask questions about any of my existing videos or if you're getting into 3d printing or have questions about it jump in there and ask questions thanks again for watching this video if you want to see more videos about 3d printing check this playlist here and if you haven't already subscribe to the channel by clicking our logo right here thanks again and have a great rest of your day

Channel: This Smart House

Views: 1,122

Keywords: 3d printer, 3d printing, raspberry pi, octoprint plugins, 3d print, octopi plugins, best octoprint plugins, the spaghetti detective, 3d printer upgrades, spaghetti detective, 3d printer time lapse, 3d printing time lapse, 3d printing business, raspberry pi 4 projects, octoprint plugins ender 3, octoprint plugins tutorial, ender 3 v2, ender 3 v2 upgrades

Id: y5x0W9mo27M

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021