Cura, OctoPrint and a Raspberry Pi

[Nicolinux 283]

Hi,

I know all three very well and use them for a long time but I never actually combined them. I have read that it is possible to install Cura (or at least the slicing engine) on the Raspbery Pi, upload a slicing profile and have stuff sliced on the Pi then used directly in OctoPrint.

Does it work? And how well - or rather - how fast? I'd imagine slicing on the Pi to be super slow. And apart from that you can't position objects interactively like with desktop version of Cura and you'd have no layer view.

Is this practical?

Thanks.

[berndjm 14]

Hi Nico,

I tried it some month ago. As resume I would say:

- the slicing is not as slow as I thought (but even not very fast )

- the Raspi is not really that power machine for such tasks ...

- you must believe on the slicing profile and have no real control over that whats going on (o.k. you can review the sliced file in gcode viewer ...)

- for me a good workflow looks other

After that I decided to stay on my old workflow slicing with cura on desktop and send the files to octoprint - for that I tweaked the 15.04 cura in a way that I have a "Send to Octoprint" Button near the "Save toolpath". So I mustn't save the file locally and upload it to octoprint, it is send directly (using octoprints API). And as a bonus you can configure Octopint in an way that it starts printing new uploaded files immediatly (if no other print job is ongoing).

For me (so far) the easiset and fastest way ...

Regards Bernd

[Nicolinux 283]

Ok, thanks. This sounds even better. Would you like to share/explain which changes you made to Cura and OctoPrint?

[berndjm 14]

First at all:

I'm not a python-coder, so some things may be not as "clean" as the could be

The changes are tested and work in my configuration / on my systems.

It's only tested on Ubuntu-Linux.

No gurantee that they will work also in other configurations.

In Octoprint are no changes needed, you have just to enable the API and CORS in "System -> API".

The API-Key is needed later on.

The changes in cura are in the "sceneview.py" (download here ) - on Linux to find in /usr/share/cura/Cura/gui/

All changes I made where commented ###.

In this file you have to adjust the following to meet your environment:

around line #143: url

around line #154: X-Api-Key

With this changes you have an additional button near the "YM" button that sends the actual file directly to Octoprint.

Have fun

Bernd

Edited January 27, 2016 by Guest

[Nicolinux 283]

Thanks Bernd.

And don't worry, I am no Python coder either. But I am on a Mac. Let's see if this works.