I quickly got sick of having to unplug/reconnect the micro SD card whenever I wanted to print something. AstroPrint and Octoprint came up as easy ready to go solutions provided you had a raspberry pi and a spare micro SD card.

I originally had the idea that I would make my 3d printing life much easier if I connected a Raspberry Pi to the printer and installed either AstroPrint or Octoprint. I then remembered I had an unloved Pine64 in the cupboard. Given the Pine64’s hardware is a bit more powerful than my Raspberry Pi I decided to use that as my 3d print server instead.

Previously I had nothing but problems with my Pine64. Of the failed experiments with Android OS, Android TV and RemixOS it had been retired back to the box from which it came. It was a great disappointment. I originally wanted to use it for something like OSMC media center but since the kernel source for the AllWinner chip is closed OSMC and others turned their nose up to the board.

A member on the Pine64 forums had built a Debian based image and installed the necessary Octoprint software along with wifi and mpegstreamer so it was ready to burn and use.

At first I had the Pine64 board connected to my network via a gigabit ethernet cable. This worked great and was super fast. Later I decided to try an old USB wifi dongle I originally bought for my Raspberry Pi. Luckily the driver firmware for the wifi chipset in it were already installed in the Debian libs firmware folder so it worked out of the box. I only had to configure the wifi id and password and reboot.

This is the web interface when accessed from a desktop browser. I connected a Logitec C270 camera and it was detected after rebooting. I have timelapse turned on by default so whenever I print the camera takes snapshots at a defined interval and then stitches them together into an mpeg movie at the end of each print.

I’m particularly impressed with the gcode visualiser. It’s amazing seeing what the printer is doing exactly in relation to the model’s gcode in realtime. Not only does it show you the printer head extruding it shows the retractions, total layers, current layer and estimated time to print that layer.