As a bit of a #homeAssistant project, I noticed my old #RaspberryPi is quite near my 3D printer (basement) and it just runs a #Mosquitto#mqtt server. It has more capacity than that, so I attached an old usb camera, loaded #nginx and wrote some #Python to take a pic of the printer and stuff it into both a web page and a home assistant dashboard.
…I don't have to turn it on when doing a 3D print job nor off afterwards. I just have it look at the pixels in the resulting pic and if it's mostly dark, it just discards it.
When I turn on the light and set up a print, the script starts keeping the now bright periodic pics and I can keep tabs on the print progress. It clears out older pics, keeping only the last few. A crontab does the timing.
Rather simple and shouldn't load the old RPi too much.
Regarding Octoprint - it's an attractive all-singing/all-dancing controller for 3D printers I've long hoped to deploy someday. My little self-crafted project however is a light-weight solution on a very old RPi, with no printer connections needed.
My older (Monoprice) 3dprinters need in-person setup & operation too, so a remote controller isn't really practical anyway.
At home I also need any excuse to stand up I can find, so the walk to my printer is helpful to keep my blood moving. :)
At a recent big-corp job I quickly made a rule that I couldn't use the coffee station on my own floor and had to go up two floors for coffee refills, and down two floors for bathroom use. That was helpful.
A bonus was that they had a fancy auto-espresso machine on the upper floors. :)
@ottaross Honestly, I use Octoprint even with the printer in the same area. Not having to fiddle with SD cards and such is enough of a benefit for me, along with being able to upgrade firmware without needing to plug my laptop into the printer's USB port. I still get up to monitor the first layer, so I'm not giving up my movement.
@3DPrintingDad It sounds quite useful on a number of fronts. Will exploit that someday for sure, probably with a newer model of printer, and a definitely a newer RPi.
I suspect the support for the older Monoprice models isn't too great. Haven't looked for a while, but last I checked there wasn't much there.
@ottaross you might be interested in Spaghetti Detective (now Obico). It's an octoprint addon, but octo runs fine on "old pi" as low as pi zero. SD is free to self host, runs on basically any x86 (not pi.) It is still worth looking at the first layers in person, but it brings peace of mind the rest of the time.
The printer connection for octo can be passive if you just want the magic bits without a workflow change. (That's how my #bambu is set up, because it's a buggy closed source mess of a printer. Octo+SD are only for monitoring prints and seeing the camera without their proprietary junk. Still gotta junk to use the printer.)
Edit: the only octo/printer support that the above stack needs is active-printing detection and a camera. I'm using the Bambu built in cam, but you can use anything. SD uses snapshots, which should be fine on a zero or old pi. (Streaming is harder.)
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