Enabling your Raspberry Pi as a server for your 3d printer! Note: 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. But give it a little time and experiment on your own, you might just amaze yourself! 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)
Pi-Bot
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, 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 Pikeyboard, 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). You can easily print a prepared GCODE-file. Also, the webinterface is online at the adress you specified at http.config. You can control basic features from 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).