OctoPrint for 3D Printing - A Simple Set Up Tutorial

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 3b plus that i'm using right here you can actually use the latest ones the four should work pretty well with them 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 you can go up to about a hundred dollars for kind of a maxed out version four but they start at 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 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 alright 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 will work on any operating system which is really handy download it unzip it and then run it just like you would with any other application now with etcher 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 will take just a minute all right once that's finished then you should now have the image transferred over to the microsd 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 gonna find my boot drive now the one file that we do need to edit on this boot drive is called octopi wpa-supplicant.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 so i'm going to go to preferences and i want to do plain text and i also want to make sure it's not using quotes there 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 wpa dash wpa2 secured this is where we're going to enter in our wi-fi network information so that the raspberry pi can connect directly to our wi-fi 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 b cable and connect the a end into the 3d printer itself i've gone ahead and turned 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 there we go and then lastly we'll provide it 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 to load essentially the operating system from the microsd card which is octopi and then get the software up and running for octoprint now over here on the computer in our browser we'll head to http colon slash slash octopi.local if you have a computer that supports bonjour services 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 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 plug-in 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

Channel: The 3D Printing Zone

Views: 62,591

Keywords: 3dprinting, octoprint, octopi, 3dprinters, 3dprinter, raspberry pi, remote control, 3d printing upgrades, tutorial, 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d printers, octo pi, octo print, octolapse, 3d print timelapse

Id: uWsD2HoId9I

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020