Adding Octoprint

Well, I finally got my system reliable enough that all I need to do is insert the SD card, select "Print from SD", and then let it run to completion.

With this kind of reliability, it's time to stop using SD cards to print, in my opinion, so I decided to set up Octoprint on a Raspberry Pi.

I purchased a Raspberry Pi 3B+ from Amazon (see this link), along with a case, camera, and longer cable.  Everything came quickly and was of high quality.  I did not purchase a microSD card, as I already had some.  Note that it will require a card of at least 4GB (I used 16)

I downloaded Octopi from the Octoprint website and followed its instructions.  I  used Balena Etcher to flash my .img.

I had to set up the camera using raspi-config.  Under the Advanced menu option I enabled the camera and enabled I2C.  Once I had those items enabled, and the camera plugged into the proper ribbon cable socket (near the middle of the board, rather than at the end), the camera worked great.

It turns out that my wi-fi is really poor in my printing room, so I decided to connect the octopi to my network with a wired ethernet connection.  I edited octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt to comment out the wi-fi configuration.  Now I have success!

Sometimes I have trouble seeing the camera feed.  When this occurs, try killing the webcamd and mjpg_streamer processes, thenrestart webcamd.  That will often get the camera going again.

Part Cooling Fan

After reading a lot on the web, I decided to add a part cooling fan to my Tronxy X3.  I found a couple of fan mounts on Thingiverse.    I found a really simple one, but it was too fragile.  I found some complex ones, but they wouldn't print well without supports, and removing the supports was a pain in the neck.

So I designed my own, using Onshape.  And posted in on Thingiverse  here.

For me, it's a great addition.