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Comment by johnz | Hacker News Reader

I’ve only ever used a 3D printer with OctoPrint. I’d be interested to hear from people who tried and stopped using OctoPrint.

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I go back and forth with it. I do use OctoPrint plugins for bed leveling and as a gcode terminal. But, I mostly print from the SD card because I have a Prusa MK3S and it has power panic support, so a print can be salvaged if power dies in the middle of a print. Additionally, I like having print stats and the printer only accumulates print time done over the SD card. Having OctoPrint work with the SD card is brutally slow.

I also turn my printer off when I'm not using it and OctoPrint's auto-reconnect doesn't work most of the time. If someone isn't paying attention and tries to connect while a print is running, it causes the printer to reboot, which isn't fun. So I largely leave it disconnected. I don't have a camera though. If I were making videos of my prints I'm sure I'd rely on OctoPrint more.

Losing that power panic thing was a big deal to me! Very unfortunate.

On the other hand, Octolapse is a lot of fun. But I went back to just using an SD card for important prints just because I value the recovery option.

My work flow changed from using one printer to using 8 of them. Octoprint is great but I haven’t taken the time or expense to set so many up since each would need their own pi. They are hard to find these days for a reasonably price. It was great when I did everything off the one printer though, I used an aftermarket runout sensor for filament on the gpio pins of the pi. I also kept track of my filament usage, used the webcam for monitoring from my house to the garage, and arc welder plugin to improve some of the prints. I am still a supporter of the program but I now just organize my SD cards neatly and manually sync them all with updated files. If my operation was bigger I would probably organize a networked solution like octoprint though.

I’ve had up to three Octoprint instances running on a single Pi with no issues.

Are Raspberry Pis a hard requirement to run Octoprint? There's plenty of other SBCs out there that are much nicer AND more available.

I run octoprint on an Intel NUC. I found my prints to be faster through octoprint than when I start them via sd card on my Ender 3.

I run OctoPrint on a RockPi, but I also rolled my own embedded Linux distro (PrintNanny OS) to package this setup.

There are a lot of small papercuts, like OctoPrint using `vcgencmd` to measure CPU throttling. `vcgencmd` is part of Raspberry Pi's userland. Not a big deal (aliased to another util). I've also added WebRTC-based streaming to my build.

The recommended way to use OctoPrint is the OctoPi image, which is based on Raspbian / Raspberry Pi OS. The OctoPi image includes extras like haproxy and mjpg streamer for HTTP-based JPEG frame stream. If you end up baking a RockPi image, here's the OctoPi root file system for reference: https://github.com/guysoft/OctoPi/tree/devel/src/modules/oct...

no, there are many replies in here where people act as such and its kinda a mystery to me in 2022. many other SBCs are arm, and many others are running debian or and can easily run the same software without 'tons of extra effort because its not a rpi'

at this point the mere thought of setting up a sbc that isnt a raspberry pi is job security and frankly im not sure why. its not like the rasberry pi 1 days

Nope, it works fine on any reasonable Linux capable computer.

Which runout sensor were you using?

If your operation expands and you want to chat about wrangling networked printer management software, shoot me an email leigh@printnanny.ai. I want to make it dead-simple to manage 10+ printers running a menagerie of software (OctoPrint, Moonraker/Mainsail) and firmwares (Marlin/Klipper). Happy to trade notes!

I believe it would slightly slow down my printer, as the slow boat OctoPrint connection is not as fast as the SD card. See https://forum.prusa3d.com/forum/original-prusa-i3-mk3s-mk3-u...

I used it for seven years or so before moving to Klipper, and then I started using Mainsail on the same hardware for the more direct integration: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/07/09/1230

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