Found good Raspberry Pi as controller site

I found a great site that describes how to use RPi as a controller - now let's be clear. This does not replace the RAMPS board OR the Arduino Mega 2560 that hosts it, this is to replace the PC component itself.

This lets you create a more stand alone 3d printer because the RPi is a small enough computer you can embed it right in the 3d Printer and control it over VNC, or even give it its own keyboard and display. Currently, this method uses Pronterface to push GCode to the 3d printer controller board.

The RPi does not have sufficient IO ports to control the motor drivers etc directly, and same holds true for the Ramps board - also RPi's IO runs at 3.3v and current Ramps 1.4 boards work at 5 volts for IO. 5 volts would destroy the RPi's CPU - it is very voltage sensitive.

With all that said, here is the site with a great guide:

http://www.britishideas.com/2012/09/29/setting-up-raspberry-pi-for-3d-printing-with-reprap/

(sadly, I do not yet have my Robo3d, so I have not had a chance to try to adapt this to it yet - but it IS a great starting point)

 

Don't know if will work but have you checked out octoprint.org?
According to their site it'll work with the RAMPS with merlin 1.4 fw.

 

I just found the setup guide here: https://github.com/foosel/OctoPrint/wiki/Setup-on-a-Raspberry-Pi-running-Raspbian

Seems very nice since you also can hook up a webcam to the pi and since it has it's own web UI you won't need the VNC solution.

 

Options are good. It gives us all choices to find the bit that best suits our needs.

 

I'm really not a fan of web UIs compared to desktop UIs, so it is nice to have options.

VNC also gives you more direct control over other functions on the RPi.

Again, it is good to have options.

 

Can only agree on that. Options are indeed a good thing!

 

I've been planning this as one of my first mods for my printer.

The end objective will be modeling and printing a mounting plate and bracket to secure the Pi into the Robo's base shell, and provide ports for the SD card slot on the Pi, as well as USB and HDMI jacks.

I haven't made it past the concept stage yet since I haven't gotten my Robo yet, but there's a post on it in the Modifications category.

 

I don't have a VIKI so I might be wrong here but I do have two raspberry pi's and I intend to hook one of them up with my robo when it arrives. The advantage with a raspberry is that you easily can hook it up to your local network and by that turning your robo into a networked 3d printer Using a ordinary web browser you can then monitor your print in progress remotely.

 

I don't know about the VIKI but with the raspberry you can make it as cheap or expensive as you want. Bare minimum is around $25-30 + SD card + Optional wifi usb as an alterative to it's built in ethernet.

Now this is just if you want to run it as a webserver/printserver. If you want a console you'll have to add monitor (with HDMI support) and input devices. So I'm guessing the pro with the VIKI is that you get at very low cost, informative display but it shouldn't be too hard too hook up a simple LCD display to the r-pi either.

 

Anyone looked at at Octoprint on Raspberry? Specifically OctoPi. You can even attach a webcam for time lapse videos and remote monitoring of your print job. You could probably even mount it underneath the Robo3D.

 

I've used Octoprint before my hot-end clogged (now waiting on E3D hot-end that will replace it, lol), but it worked fairly well. I did run into problems with the wifi adapter I purchased that would drop pings constantly, but I replaced that and didn't see any connection problems since. I had to do a small change/modification to Octoprint to allow me to run at 250000 baud-rate to connect to the Robo3d successfully:
https://github.com/foosel/OctoPrint/issues/222

I was able to generate a time-lapse video, which was pretty neat, but I will need to find/make a mounting bracket to mount the PS3-Eye cam...

 

Happily using OctoPrint + Pi + Pi Camera from Day 1 on.

 

FWIW even though this is an old post, octoprint is very awesome so I'll share my experience. There seems to be some confusion about what running a Pi as a print server offers. Unlike a controller interface like the viki (which I know little about) and the reprapdiscount XXL LCD (which I have), hooking up a pi to your printer basically replaces your computer and its software. A pi is really just a PC, so you're replacing your desktop/laptop with something local to the printer, small, and low power consumption. And most importantly single purpose, no competing for resources like on your general purpose PC.

So, running a print server is great because it decouples your printer from your PC. Nothing like being 22 hours into a print and kicking out the USB cable or spinning up a video game and killing the resources on your PC, and end up crashing the printing software. Sure you can just load the gcode onto an SD card to avoid this issue, and you still can, but running it off the Pi make its much less necessary and offers a lot of features. I only bother loading up the SD card for anything over maybe 4 hours, just an arbitrary threshold.

Anyway, octoprint provides full remote access. I can log into my print server from work and check on the status of a long print. I can see its progress through my webcam (IPcam in my case). I can cancel the print from work, or even from my phone if something if going bad. IF for some reason I was inclined to, I could power on my printer, upload a print remotely, and start the print, all without ever stepping foot into the room my printer is in.

I get emailed when it's done, a timelapse video gets automatically created, and my printer shuts down after an idle time out.

It logs just like any standard linux style server, so I can follow the live logs easily and I can parse the logs over time to get some historical statistics. I like the idea that I can line up the photos/video of a print with the details logs including serial data.

You can slice your stl automatically upon upload, it uses cura by default. And you can still use your desktop software of choice to inspect, configure, slice your models. You just don't print from the desktop software any longer.

It's pretty stable and customizable, I love it. I'm currently printing this case (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:99300) and will mount the pi to my printer to make it a self contained and fairly portable unit. Which means I can pick this printer up and take it well away from office, maybe to my garage to print ABS for example and have the same consistent set up on boot and I don't have to hang out in the garage to monitor the print, I can watch a live video feed from say my laptop/tablet, if anything goes wrong, stop.

I'm using ethernet which is built into the pi but if I want to I could spent a couple bucks and attach a USB wifi adapter, boom wifi printer, just need power. Hell hook it up to a car battery and have a truly wireless printer, jk.

Lastly, you can upload gcode to the pi or to your printers SD card directly by drag and drop of files into octoprint's user interface, which is cool. However I took it a step further and I set up the folder where the gcode files get saved on the pi as a network file share. I then mounted that file share as drive G: on my workstation. So now when I do my slicing in say repetier I can save the gcode directly to the device.

I'd go so far as to say it's changed my life. Octoprint plus the recent XXL controller/screen I installed has really cut the lag time and BS compared to when I was just doing desktop software only.