Octoprint plugins for better and safer printing - PSU relay control

I'm back with some more octoprint plugins to make your 3d printer better and safer [Music] [Music] octoprint is a very handy addition to 3d printing we have a Raspberry Pi with special software designed to connect to the printer and control it wirelessly I've made a guide to setting it up in the past and have also made a guide on some of the best plugins to extend its functionality today I'm covering some plugins suggested by viewers in the comments of that video as well as some new plugins to make your 3d printing experience better as well as safer to install any of these plugins we're going to come up to the spanner in the top and then scroll down until we get to the plugin manager from there we can click get more and then we can search for whichever one we're after on occasion you'll find a plug-in that's not in the repo and you can either paste in a URL or download a zip and then upload it back to your octoprint instance the first plug-in we're going to install was highly recommended by a number of people in the comments and it's called print time genius you've probably noticed that the print time estimate from your slicer and standard octoprint is quite often out but this plugin claims to learn from your printer over time to get it within 0.2 percent accuracy we can search for it in the plugin manager and then click install after the package has hopefully installed successfully you commonly get a message telling you to restart and when you do so octoprint will restart with your new plugin loaded now installing a plug-in won't necessarily add anything obvious to the screen and in this instance we need to come back to the settings and then scroll down to our plugins and then we'll find our new plug-in menu I chose to leave everything on default but now you know there are other options if you want to tweak the performance for a test I've sliced a simple cylinder that simplified VOD is telling me will take 12 minutes now when I started in octoprint and click print I'm expecting some things to happen we noticed as a star here and the print time left is 1557 so let's check out if that's accurate the freaky Heating has finished and we can see that the print time has continued to countdown despite the print not physically starting we'll see how accurate it ends up being [Music] we're partway in and the print time continues to adjust and we need to remember that this will get more accurate over time and it will learn how long it takes a heated bed and the hot end to heat up and include those in the timing so it's just finished and it took 24 and a half minutes so what I'm going to do now is upload the exact same G code with a different name and then we'll click it and get a prediction and see if it gets closer to this so we should now be able to click the start the details load and although we've never printed it before it's predicting the time very accurately it seems that all of the comments were correct this is just going to get better and better over time and I look forward to seeing its results improve gradually next up we have the exclude region plug-in and this one was also highly recommended the idea is that when you're printing multiple parts and if one of them comes loose mid print you can drag a box around that part and then octoprint will ignore that saving filament and preventing spaghetti from going everywhere and colliding with the good parts ruining them - lets do a quick practical demonstration and I've set up four small parts on the plate midway through the print a 3d printing ninja comes in in dislodges one on purpose so how can this plugin help to use this one we're going to come to our G code viewer and then we can add a rectangle to the printer we know it's our front left now we'll click accept and everything inside this box should be ignored let's check back with the printer as we can see in octoprint the red box is surrounding our geometry and that matches our result on the printer there was a little bit of filament that oozed out before we could activate the plug-in but the problem won't get any worse because the extruder is no longer going near the bottom left shape I just used a rectangle but there are far more options and that to use as well and here is the finished print as you can see after I activated the plug-in no further extrusion took place and the end result is quite clean with minimal tidy-up in my opinion this is one of the most useful plugins you could ever use with 3d printing so there's some plugins that can definitely enhance their experience but now let's turn our attention to safety marlyn and other firmware comes with a range of in built safety features and I've covered these before they include shutting down the printer when the minimum temp is registered a maximum temp is registered and the very important and often left out thermal runaway protection in this video I also showed you what could happen if any of these safety features aren't enabled so if your firmware set up properly you should be right correct well not always check out this end of three mainboard that's had a MOSFET failure when we power it up everything seems okay but if you look very closely at the actual microcontroller there's a crack across the top plastic surface but the real damage is the MOSFET hidden underneath for the heated bed you can see on LCD that the target temperature for the heated bed is in fact zero but you can see I also have probes connected to the output of the heated bed and it is outputting a steady twenty two point five volts meaning the heated bed will be receiving full power and there's nothing the firmware can do the only way to fix this situation is to cut the power entirely here's how our firmware normally works our power supply goes into the mainboard and that is used to control the hot end as well as the heated bed but in our scenario that's just not enough by introducing a Raspberry Pi we have control over the mainboard and by controlling a relay in between the power supply and the mainboard we have control over the power supply going to Mullin which means we can kill the power even when the mainboard card and that's where our next plug-in comes in PSU control this allows us to turn the power supply on and off through octoprint one really nice thing is that on its github it has a wiki with lots of setup information as well as troubleshooting you'll need to mount a 5 volt tolerant relay somewhere near your mainboard and Raspberry Pi in this video I'm using the end of 3 and a case that I designed in a previous video it's got room for the Raspberry Pi buck converter as well as a relay the relay that we need will be five dollars at the most there's some different options when buying relays try to avoid one of these bear ones on the left they have all of the pins that we need but they don't have a breakout board others can be confusing because I have extra pins that aren't used so instead I'd recommend going with one with three pins on each side one side takes away as we want to switch and the other side has three pins for logic from the Raspberry Pi back to our set up diagram and we need to install wiring between the Raspberry Pi and the logic of the relay this is a side labeled signal five volts and ground raspberry PI's have a series of general input/output pins across the top and on their website they have the numbers of the pins for these I think it's easiest to use pin 14 because it has a ground and a 5 volts next to it on the actual Raspberry Pi it looks like this and I use jst connectors to wire them up on my relay I have signal 5 volts and ground and then we skip the first pin and have 5 volts ground and signal from the Raspberry Pi the next thing we need to take care of is the red power wire from the PSU to the main board with the power off locate the large red wire and find a place where you can fold it over and it will reach the relay you could then cut this strip back to the ends and insert it into the relay terminals here's my relay fully wired up but there are three pins and only two wires so we have a choice if you connect to common and normally closed power will go to the main board unless the Raspberry Pi sends a signal to turn it off and this is more convenient because you can still use the printer without a Raspberry Pi connected instead I chose to wire between common and normally open this means the printer will never receive 24 volts unless it receives a signal from the Raspberry Pi this is less convenient because you can't use the printer without the Raspberry Pi but it's safer because there can never be any accidents back in our settings were going to scroll down to psu control and you can enter your settings as you see on my screen here our switching method is going to be g-code command and as we said before we're using pin 14 if it's working in reverse of what you expect tick or untick this invert box if you want you can put in your start or ng code ma T or M anyone to turn on or off the power supply we also have these options here that when we tick the box and send one of these commands such as movement homing or heating that the power supply is automatically turned on after the delay in seconds put here we can also automatically turn the supply off when it's idle after the specified time but only after the hot em heater cools to the desired temperature that we enter up in the top corner we'll have this new icon here that we can click to turn on the power supply it will light up green and you'll probably hear a click from the relay this means your printer is now energized with 24 volts which means it can move stepper motors and heat up the nozzle and bed if I turn it off and then hit something like home you can see that it automatically turns on the power supply to enable the stepper movement this plug-in by itself is highly convenient but it becomes much safer when we pair it up with temperature failsafe after we install this and go to the settings we need to click enable and then set our hot end and bed thresholds the most common usage is to set a temperature above what you normally print so if you do have a MOSFET that is failed at providing current to the heaters this plug-in will recognize it and cut the power within 5 seconds there's only one tricky bit and that's entering the command here to get it to talk to our power supply plug in to cut the power automatically back in the wiki for the PSU control plug-in we have our answer there's a line here that we can copy and paste into that box but we need to substitute two values the first is your content server and that's simply your local IP address that you have fog to print the second is your API key that's something you'll find by going to API in your octave print settings substituting those two values save and you're ready to go it's probably worth setting a really low temperature like 50 degrees on your hot end and then making sure the heaters and the power supply is cut off as soon as it exceeds this one more that I haven't really used but I found interesting enough to include for other people to follow up is the spaghetti detective it uses your webcam to monitor your prints and if it thinks something is loose on the bed it can send you an alert inviting you to choose to shut down your printer the interface can be accessed externally so if you have to go to work why are you leaving a print running this is a little bit of extra insurance the beauty of using a Raspberry Pi as a watchdog is that it's independent of your firmware and mainboard another level of redundancy for safety is definitely a good thing I had planned to go a step further and fit an mq to smoke detected a shutoff power automatically but it wasn't sensitive enough and by the time there was enough smoke to trigger it cutting the power to the heaters would not have stopped the resultant fire that brings us to the end of my list but like last time I'm sure there's plenty of great suggestions that you can leave in the comments thank you so much for watching and until next time happy 3d printing g'day it's Michael again if you liked the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click Subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 167,218

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d print, 3d printer, 3d printed, octoprint, octopi, safety, relay, psu, power supply, plugins, creality, ender 3, printtimegenius, print time genius, excluderegion, exclude region, psu control, psucontrol, temperaturefailsafe, temperature failsafe, temperature fail safe, spaghetti detective, spaghettidetective

Id: ozCqqlPJ3a0

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019