2014-01-21

Makibox with embedded Raspberry Pi

My Makibox is finally printing fine except for some MacOS related random freezes during long prints.
So I'm currently working on repling the desktop PC altogether and integrating a Raspberry Pi directly into the case of the Makibox.
Thus it will be remote operated via WiFi/Ethernet and a secured web UI.

Setup

Since I used MacOS, it was difficult to just DD the image onto the SD card.
(You can't do that while it's mounted and while it's not mounted you are missing the device entry.)
So I downloaded a small utility program to do that for me.

Wifi

SSH was already configured. Pasword pi/paspberry. WiFi was already configured sans the networks keys.
With sudo I could easily edit the wpa_supplicant config.
At first it didn't want to boot unless Ethernet was connected.
I don't know why it works now.

Camera

My plan is to connect the Raspberry Pi camery but I haven't done so yet.
Octopi does support it.
There  is a nice swivel camera mount here but the base doesn't slice correctly with Slic3r and it is missing the back of the camera PCB case.

Power

(Not done yet)
The Printrboard inside the Makibox seems to already provide 5V that I could use to power the Raspberry Pi.
GND Pin 6
5V Pin 2

Physical mounting

I'm working on it and will post the design files and STL exports on YouMagine soon. (No Thingiverse for me any more, sorry.)

Printer Settings 

You just need to set default temperatures and feedrates for jogging.
For some reason Octoprint/Octopi are not interested in the physical limits of your printer at all.

On-board slicing

Very experimental, so I haven't done that yet.
Here is the tutorial.

Update


To update Octoprint on the Raspberry Pi, just SSH into the board and git-checkout the newest version.

Problems!!!


The Raspberry Pi has one very important issue.
The SD card slot may loose contact at any time.
When that happens you get an "internal server error" in the middle of a print and cannot do anything via SSH because you are lacking all commands and files because...your file system is suddenly gone.
You can apply pressure to the SD card to counter this effect.
My Raspberry mounting above contains a pressure arm for that purpose.


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