Control my Prusa 3D printer with a 35$ raspberry pi!

Written by Walter Schreppers on 12/9/2012

Received my raspberry pi in the mail a few weeks ago. Figured how great it would be to let it control my printer instead of leaving my laptop in the garage all night. A day of hacking later in node.js and I had it up and running. This allowed me to connect a raspberry pi to any 3D printer and then control it from the internet.

Nowadays everyone knows and uses octoprint which is indeed a way more polished and excellent project to do the same thing. However when I created this. It wasn't released yet. So basically I was one of the first people in the world doing this. That's why later on this got featured in wired magazine!

Printerface future work

1. Better stylesheet (most likely jquery mobile so I can also do it on my android phone ;) ).
2. Add drop down box so you can select from all gcode files uploaded to print.
3. Add interface for a webcam which I will mount on the second printer. That way I can even print from work and watch the progress with some snapshots from the webcam (I have a cheap psp cam for that).
4. Once code is clean enough, release it into the wild on github !

Incidently my nice second black printer is completely printed with the first ugly blue one. Why? Because we can ;) No really it has lots of improvements also, should be easier to maintain etc. What I meant with controlling the printer without a laptop is that since it's just a site I can use my android phone or tablet as well! Even more cool is that on boot the raspberry reports it's ip to a webserver of mine so I can access it from anywhere, more on that in the next vid this weekend ;)

Here's a video with demo of printerface running for the first time: