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My first planned mod: Pi Controller

Discussion in 'Mods and Upgrades' started by Drathus, May 23, 2013.

  1. Drathus

    Drathus Guest

    Well, as the ROBO team works on assembling our little beauties, I've been doing more work on the planning side for the first mod I want to make to my printer.

    Building in a Raspberry Pi.

    My plan so far is to find a spot on the front or side of the base where there will be sufficient empty space to stick a Raspberry Pi model B.

    To mount the Pi, I plan to cut out a section of the bottom case, and fit in a 3D printed cover plate which will give access to the Pi's SD card slot, as well as provide USB and HDMI jacks.

    My end goal is to be able to plug a keyboard, mouse, and monitor into my Robo 3D and have it be self sufficient, so I can set it up away from my main computer work area. And a $40 Raspberry Pi is a much easier solution than dedicating a laptop to the task. =)


    Has anyone else thought of taking a similar path? Or are most people just planning on running next to a comp, or via a VIKI interface or other SD only print selecting?
     
  2. Matthias

    Matthias Member

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    Check out octoprint.org
     
  3. tesseract

    tesseract Moderator
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    Not sure about the Pi but there were a lot of people looking at the VIKI with its SD card reader to run the ROBO, myself included. We also have multiple design for VIKI cases floating around here as well
     
  4. Drathus

    Drathus Guest

    I've looked at that, and while it looks interesting I'm more interested in keeping it local and self-contained as opposed to working it remotely.
     
  5. Harry

    Harry Team ROBO 3D
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    Me Too! I am interested in doing something local with it, but it can be external as well.
     
  6. Printed Solid

    Printed Solid Volunteer Admin
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    Have you seen this? http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:27758

    A few comments: First of all, my electronic design skills are not strong, but I'm up for helping in any way I can. I'd probably be most useful for enclosure design work.

    When you talk about being self sufficient, do you mean as a printserver or are you thinking that you will run design software, slicer, etc on it as well? Design software and slicing can be pretty resource intensive, so you'll probably need to beef up from a rasberry pi if that is the plan. What features other than file selection and print are you going to try to incorporate?
     
  7. Matthias

    Matthias Member

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    It depends on what you mean by "local". What I do see is that a Pi won't be fast enough to get a decent performance when it comes to 3d modeling, slicing. I did't try,that on my Pi's but I did run it on my W500 Thinkpad. So, the only thing you, realistically, will able to do is push the gcode to your printer, and that's what octoprint does.
     
  8. keraynopoylos

    keraynopoylos New Member

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    Octoprint looks very useful!

    Is there a hardware guide (how to connect it to the taurino board of our robo) somewhere?
     
  9. Drathus

    Drathus Guest

    I have workstations for doing the design work.

    Mostly I'll be using the pi as a gcode feeder, but where my printer will be placed I won't have a network drop; nor is there much wifi signal there. Hence why I'm looking for a local and not remote controlled setup.
     
  10. Drathus

    Drathus Guest

    Pretty much just that, with monitoring of the print progress on a monitor.

    However as I put in my last post, where I'm planning on setting up my printer will be away from any network drops and out of wifi signal range.
     
  11. Matthias

    Matthias Member

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    They also have a community on Google+ where you can directly contact Gina who basically runs the project.
     
  12. keraynopoylos

    keraynopoylos New Member

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    I haven't found anything regarding the physical connection between the RPi and the control board. Could it may be that you just connect them USB to USB?
     
  13. Matthias

    Matthias Member

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    As I don't have my printer just yet, I can only make an educated guess... What other connection might be possible?
     
  14. keraynopoylos

    keraynopoylos New Member

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    For some reason I originally expected it to require pin-to-pin connection(kind of like a shield only in a more "manual" or "custom" way).
     
  15. Matthias

    Matthias Member

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    I took a brief look at the RAMPS 1.4 board that'll be coming with our printers. That one only has a i2c connection, so now, yes, I think we'll need some manual wiring to hook it up to the Pi. Doesn't look like rocket science tho..
     
  16. keraynopoylos

    keraynopoylos New Member

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    Unless the RPi connects to the USB port of the arduino mega...
     
  17. Drathus

    Drathus Guest

    That's what I was planning on doing at least.
     
  18. pclabtech

    pclabtech Active Member

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    Kisslicer has a version for the Raspberry Pi as well.
     

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