Use smart plugs + Octoprint to improve your 3D printing

today I'm going to show you how you can run your 3d printer more efficiently for less money and safer with a Wi-Fi smart plug and other home automation devices [Music] [Music] home automation has really taken off that's when you have a smart device that you can talk to to control things around your home I fin really slow to the party with this because I thought you needed to build a house new with all of these things in place but really that couldn't be further from the truth in this video we're going to use an inexpensive Wi-Fi smart plug combined with a couple of solutions one of which being octoprint to make your 3d printing experience better we'll do it in two stages and we'll start with how to set up one of these Wi-Fi smart plugs the smart Wi-Fi plug that I purchased and we'll be featuring in this video is the tp-link HS 100 as you can see on the box it works with Google Assistant as well as with Amazon Alexa it's also worth noting that if you don't have these devices you can still operate it just fine from your phone the good news is these are only around ten dollars each and then can be much cheaper if you want to buy them in bulk in Australia we have a different prong pattern on our powerpoints that apart from that what I'm presenting in this video should be the same anywhere in the world this product has multiple features the main one we're interested in is remote access but scheduling and away mode might interest you as well the instructions are on the side of the box and it's about as easy as they say all setup work is done on your phone through either an Apple or Google app inside the box there's not much to it we have the actual smart plug a little bit of paperwork and we get to peel off the protective film on the actual unit we have an on/off button as well as a Settings button which I've never had to use thus far before we get started we need to download and install the free cuz a smart app I'm demonstrating on Android here but it is also available for Apple devices inside the app we tap the plus in upper right and then select device we then scroll down until we find smart plug and as animation is prompting us it's now time to plug it in and turn it on at first deliver your solid orange light for the Wi-Fi symbol but after a few seconds this should start to blink and that tells you that it's ready to be set up in the software back in the app we can now tap the next button and as it says it'll take a few moments to establish a connection on the next screen which I've blurred here for security it's going to ask you to select which Wi-Fi network to connect to and then after that you'll input the password for your local network it'll then switch the smart plug from connecting to your phone to connecting to your local network and yes this one will actually take a few minutes following this we'll have the chance to name our device make sure you pick something that's easy to pronounce because you could be doing this via voice command here I just went for the very generic 3d printer now we're prompted to select an icon for the cursor up there wasn't really anything that resembled a 3d printer so I went to the camera mode took a poorly lit photo and then made it even worse with some awkward cropping a bit of a fail but you could make a nice icon save it to your phone and add it to the app after this we're done but it usually will prompt you for a firmware update which you should definitely do this will take a few minutes one advantage of the system is we now gain a button to manually turn the printer on and off and this is handy because most power boards don't have individual switches on the app you'll see your icon and a large power button on the side when we click it the printer turns on and conversely when we click it to turn it off the printer turns off doing it this way is more or less instantaneous as you can see I have a lot of devices set up in this room all of the 3d printers is seen behind me a connected via a smart plug on each side with the white cord you see going to a power board where all of my 3d printers are plugged in as well as a 5 volt hub for raspberry PI's one really handy feature is the ability to create groups for instance I have four lights grouped together under studio lights and the left and right power boards grouped together under Studio machines that gives you the convenience of being able to turn on multiple devices in this case four lights with a single command this is more efficient for me but one of the plugs was hard to get to and I would frequently cut myself on the edge of my shredder let's step things up and add voice control and in google home you can link non Google devices in this case you can see there's a category I've already linked called tp-link cursor when I scroll down however you can see that is a lot of devices that are compatible with Google home and I'm guessing also with Amazon Alexa once you've linked the services together and verified your accounts all of your groups and individual devices will be imported and it gives you the ability to do everything by voice hey Google turn on 3d printer sure turning on the 3d printer there's a bit of a delay here but it is awfully convenient especially when doing multiple devices with groups a word of caution these plugs don't work well with devices that have a standby switch here your life power is connected but nothing turns on with the light until I manually click a button any devices you have that work like this won't be suitable for automation 3d printers however work well because we can just leave the power supply switch on and rely on the smart plugs to do the rest so far we've ticked the box for convenience and probably a box for novelty as well but what about the money saving as well as safety let's advance things by introducing a Raspberry Pi using octoprint on a Raspberry Pi to turn on and off 3d printer power is something I've covered before except on that occasion I used a relay and that involved messing with the wiring which I'm sure you'll agree is nowhere near as easy as a method we've seen in this video there's also the issue of buying a relay that can handle enough current to run your 3d printer that's why this time round we're going to do everything wirelessly the trickiest bit here is enabling your device to have a permanent IP address on your router this is going to be different for every router but hopefully you'll find instructions for your particular model in my case I set the IP address to one ninety two dot one six eight dot one dot nine it doesn't matter what you set yours to as long as you know the number now that we have this ready back in octoprint we're going to go to the plugin manager and search for a specific plugin by typing in TP it'll tourists and show us the plugin that we need and then we'll click install let it download and then soon after the pile will prompt us to reboot we'll then click restart now and after a minute or so the Raspberry Pi will restart and you'll be able to click and reload the interface to finish setting up our smart plug we come back to the settings spanner and then scroll down to the bottom where it says tp-link smart plug now we're going to come up and click the plus and we're going to add the IP address we just set up in the router for me that's 192.168.1.2 I the label you can put us whatever you want I use the super creative name of power we're not going to explore these other settings yet we're simply going to come to close then click Save and now we have a new power icon up in the top bar clicking it will toggle the power of the printer when it's red it means off and when we click to turn it to green it puts the printer on if we try to turn the printer back off we get a nice warning message so we don't do it by accident and ruin any prints now that we know it's working we can start to explore all of these other options for each of them if you hover over the buttons you'll get tooltips and there's also a page in the plug-in repository with screenshots and text explanations of each setting before the plug-in will let us enable some of these options we need to close and set up the base parameters first on the main settings screen now we are trying to make this safe fast so we absolutely should tick enable thermal runaway monitoring we can then set some values where we want the printer to turn off if these temperatures are exceeded we'll also get the printer to monitor when there's an error event and will tick the two boxes below it to make it as thorough as possible this now means it'll disconnect if there's an error and it'll check the status of the printer every 15 minutes back in the plug settings we can now confirm that we want this particular plug to turn off if any of these errors are registered the reason we have to do these things twice is that there's the capability to set up more than one smart plug for most people this won't be needed but for others they might have some sort of chamber heater powered from a separate connection that's not run by the 3d printer mainboard let's explore some of these other options a simple one to understand is g-code trigger m82 turn the power supply on and m81 to turn it off or already inbuilt into marlin to use them here we would have the command in our g code followed by the IP address of our smart plug for instance in your slicer you might come to your ending script and then insert the correct g code to turn off your printer automatically at the end of a print this feature is ok but there is a more sophisticated way to do it and that's by selecting off on idle now when we tick this box on the right hand side we can have the printer shut down anytime that we're not using it this first timer relates to how long a confirmation box will be displayed to cancel the auto power off the idle time out is how long after the printer is being used that it will shut down and the idle target temperature means the printer won't attempt to shut down until the hot end has cooled to below this level this can be handy so the cooling fan for the hot end heatsink can remain on for long enough for your hot end to cool down appropriately I'm gonna set these really short for now save and do a test it's been almost a minute which is the value I set and now the warning box will come up for 5 seconds which I also set octoprint will then disconnect from the 3d printer mainboard and power down the smart plug we can also have it reconnect to the mainboard as soon as we power up it'll do so after the set amount of seconds and you need to disable off on disconnects to avoid getting stuck in a weird loop now when we click the button to turn on the printer after the three seconds that I set we should see the serial port connect automatically there's a couple more options that we have any explored yet and they're running system commands and using delays let's say we wanted to connect online and run a script when the print was finished we could tick the box and then input this command here and then enable the timer and set a long enough to lay that the pie has ample time to connect and receive confirmation before any power is cut these system commands are not Mullens ready printed commands but rather commands that run on the Raspberry Pi system hosting octoprint one quote you might notice is that after the power supply for the 3d printer is cut the LCD screen will still be lit up because it's receiving five volts from the Raspberry Pi even when the serial is disconnected this is not ideal and sometimes the mainboard can even emit a high-pitched whine the cheapest way to fix this is to put some tape over the power pins or print out this little sleeve that you can find for free on Thingiverse this fix will ensure that when your smart plug turns off your thready printer will - hopefully you agree that this combination of parts makes a pretty good setup it's going to be more convenient it's gonna save you money by switching off your printer when it's idle and with that error and safety check monitoring in place it could potentially switch off your printer if there was about to be a disaster I've taken things a few steps further on the roof above me I have a Google Wi-Fi connected smoke alarm also on the opposite wall I've got a Google Nest Wi-Fi camera one question I see come up a lot in 3d printing community groups is is it safe to leave the house with your printer still running well my setup aims to address this problem if the smoke alarm detects smoke or carbon monoxide I'll get a notification on my phone I'll then be able to open the live camera feed even if I'm not connected to the home network I can zoom in check for trouble and if need be I can then go and cut the power to any of my machines in the horrible event that a fire had already broken out not only can I kill the power but I have enough knowledge to ring up the emergency services and try and get the fire brigade to my house it's not perfect but considering all of the products I have coming into the studio for a review it's an added safety net that I was more than willing to pay for if you've got any thoughts and how you can use home automation for 3d printing or any of your other hobbies please leave them down below in the comment section 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: 83,611

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, automation, home automation, smart plug, tp-link, kasa, hs100, hs110, octoprint, raspi, raspberry pi, plugin, unboxing, unbox, installation, setup, instructions, tutorial, guide, how to, lesson, safety, thermal runaway, marlin, auto power off, power off on idle, cost saving, affordable, effiiency, ok google, google home, alexa, amazon, voice control, voice command

Id: fi8cms-Wnnk

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020