Up till now I have been using an old laptop to connect to the 3D printer through Pronterface. While this works fine, it does mean having to shift gcode files around on my network and to have to power up the old donkey… which can take a while… each time I use the printer.

From day zero I knew I wanted to get OctoPrint running on a Raspberry Pi so that I could control the printer from any web browser, upload gcode, start prints and as a massive bonus be able to watch how the printer is getting on via remote viewing a webcam.

In this video I run through, step by step, how I did this and how you could too for very little cost. As I discuss in the video there are at least two ways of doing this on a Raspberry Pi (OctoPrint is also available for many other platforms), the hard way which is preparing the Pi yourself, building OctoPrint and installing all necessary dependencies.  Then there is the easy way, flashing an image of OctoPi. In this video I cover the latter method, although I will likely do another video covering the fully manual way.

At this time I see no downside to using the OctoPi image – but we shall see!!!

In order to do this yourself, aside of a Raspberry Pi and cables, you will need some freely available software. Here are the links to download that:-

• Win32 Disk Imager
• SD Card Formatter
• OctoPi on GitHub

If you are interested in reading all the documentation for OctoPrint you can find that on the website here.

If for any reason you need to know more about HAProxy you can spend a chunk of your life reading about it here. (Not for the faint hearted. Long story short, among other things, it is a server proxy that runs on Linux that can manage network traffic to and from the machine.)