Busy weekend

Last weekend was a very busy weekend printer wise.

I know I have been bad at updating and taking pictures.

I picked up a Raspberry Pi last payday and I installed OctoPrint on it, I can now monitor, control, print etc. from anywhere I have a network connection.

A 3D printer is basically just a serial controlled robotic device, I know that is a mouthful but what it means is that it is brainless... now it has a brain but only for where to move, when, when to extrude plastic, what to extrude etc. but if I gave it a model to print it would not know what to do with it so you have to basically send the model sliced up one command at a time from a computer or save the sliced up model to an sd card and then plug the sd card into the printer and then it can print, so basically if you don't use an sd card you have to have a computer hooked up to the printer at all times tying up your computer and so if windows reboots for an update in the middle of the print you just wasted the print.

Enter the OctoPrint and Raspberry PI, it is a mini computer that costs around $28 and it now can play go between, now I can just send my file to it over the net, completely control the printer manually moving the head and bed around, changing the temperature, monitor the print via webcam, send custom commands etc. from anywhere I have a network connection whether it be my phone or a pc at work.

I printed a case for the Raspberry PI.

I printed some fan brackets to mount a fan to cool off the main control board.

I printed some spool holders that I created, I will toss up some pictures of them later.