Year 2 - The internet of things

All this part of the course has been made with the great help of Lukas Winkler.

From Wikipedia definition, OctoPrint is an open source 3D print controller application. So to say a Free software under the AGPL v3 license in order to print things. Please check their Github page if you would like more information about the project.

To make things simple, Octoprint is just sending and receiving g-code commands. So to say "move to (x,y,z) with speed f" into controls to the motors.

Octoprint does not have any slicer, so you will need one in addition to it. The slicer, also called slicing software, is a computer software used in the majority of 3D printing processes for the conversion of a 3D object model to specific instructions for the printer

What are g-code commands?

From Wikipedia, G-code is a language in which people tell computerized machine tools how to make something. G stands for geometry.

Requirements to install Octoprint

Octoprint relies on Python 2, so you will need to have it installed. You can check your Python version with:

python2 --version

and you will also have to check if virtualenv is installed to. To install it run:

sudo apt install python-virtualenv

Starting the installation of Octoprint

In order to start installing Octoprint just create a folder:

mkdir octoprint

Then, go within it:

cd octoprint

and then run:

virtualenv --python=python2 OctoPrint

Ok, so now you need to go within the following folder /Octoprint/bin/ which have been created and then run:

./pip install octoprint

Many things are going to be downloaded, then run:

./octoprint

If for some reasons the port is busy, by default it is port 5000, you can always change it within the following file .octoprint/config.yaml:

cd ~

then:

nano .octoprint/config.yaml

and add port: 1234 to it. Save the file.

Ok so once your octoprint file is executed, you can access to localhost:your-port-number in order to config Octoprint:

About the configuration

The first question Octoprint will ask you is about your credentials. This is a really powerful software acting as a remote printer, so have, as usual strong identifier and password.

Then it is asking you about anonymous tracking, this is up to you.

Then it is asking you for connectivity check, this is interesting if you would like to get regular updates though it is using by default Google server, so if you are concerned about privacy either change those or disable the connectivity check. Then enable the blacklist processing. Then you come to the printer profile step. If you have only one printer, just leave the general tab as it is as you won't have any confusion to identify it, regarding print bed and build volume this is set by default for most standard 3D printers, within the Hotend & extruder the nozzle diameter is important, check your 3D printer documentation to ensure you are not ruining anything, in my case it was 0.4mm:

You can skip the server commands instructions part. So as the part dealing with Webcam & Timelapse Recordings.

Congratulations, you now have a server running Octoprint.

Last but not least, you need now to give the authorization to yourself to use the printer, so perform:

sudo usermod -a -G tty your-identifier
sudo usermod -a -G dialout your-identifier

and reboot.