Pi-Bot, 3d printing for Raspberry Pi

thingiverse

This is a guide on how to set up your Raspberry Pi as a printerserver for your 3d printer! Instructions (note: PDF is attached with better formatting) This guide is far from complete. In fact, you won’t even get it running the way you really want. Pronterface’s webinterface is not ready for primetime just yet (lacking a lot of necessary features) . But give it a little time and experiment on your own, you might just amaze yourself! If you've got any tips, errors or additions, please let me know! (if you like, use the attached logo for your SD-card) My endgoal is to make either a distributable image or a script that does all this work on its own, but i'm a long way from getting there. Please help if you can! Requirements Raspberry Pi 4gb SDcard (class 4 or up) Regular PC (WinMacLin) Internet connection to PC and to Pi board Micro USB cable for power and a USB cable to your 3d printer USB keyboard/mouse HDMI enabled screen (TV will do fine) First things first. We need to download a Raspbian image to the SDcard. Get the image at http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads and follow the guide at http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup When the SDcard is complete, connect the Pi to your HDMI screen, network, keyboard, SDcard and last: power. After a short wait you should get the configuration menu. Check your settings and most importantly: enable SSH connections! Also use the SD card partition resizer. Reboot after you’ve saved your settings by using ‘sudo reboot’ Connect to your Pi using SSH, login as pi/raspberry. Alternatively, if you are sitting comfortably at your Pi-keyboard, just use that. After login, it’s time to do some updates: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade This will take a little while. After that, it’s wise to reboot (sudo reboot) and reconnect a minute or so later. Now we will install a lot of dependencies and useful tools. This will take some time. sudo apt-get install python python-dev python-serial python-wxgtk2.8 python-pyglet git-core The system will ask you if it’s okay to download and use diskspace. Sure it is. Now we’ve got a complete set of Python tools and the Git system, which will download Pronterface for us! We’ll need CherryPy for the web-server part. wget download.cherrypy.org/cherrypy/3.2.0rc1/CherryPy-3.2.0rc1.tar.gz tar -xf CherryPy-3.2.0rc1.tar.gz cd CherryPy-3.2.0rc1/ sudo python setup.py install To test CherryPy you can do the following cd cherrypy/tutorial pico tutorial.conf edit the IP adress to the Pi’s adress, press control+O (writeout, press enter) and control+X (exit) python tut01_helloworld.py Use a browser on any computer in the network, visit: Pi’s IP adress:8080 You should get a hello world. Press control+C afterwards to exit CherryPy’s demo. Great stuff! Now everything is ready for Pronterface! cd /home/pi git clone git://github.com/kliment/Printrun.git This will download the latest version of Pronterface/Printrun. But for the webinterface we need the experimental branch: cd Printrun git checkout -b experimental origin/experimental You can check and change the settings for the Webinterface using Pico: pico http.config (change it to your IP adress!) pico auth.config But first we need to edit Pronterface to enable the webinterface: pico pronterface.py Find the line ‘webavail = False’ and change it to ‘True’. Save and exit. At this point you can run pronterface.py from the GUI (using Python) and your webinterface will be waiting for you! To enable STL slicing, you can install Skeinforge by typing sudo apt-get install skeinforge which will install skeinforge to /usr/share/skeinforge. Slic3r should work, but i haven’t got it operational just yet (a lot of dependencies and stuff required).