A first approach to IoT, connecting my 3D printer to the internet

My first approach to the IoT, connecting my 3D printer to the internet

IoT is one of those fancy words that people like to talk about in conferences and in TedTalks without (apparently) having too much idea of what it is all about.

Set up to manage the 3D printer through the internet

This one is going to be a short entry where I don't go through code or anything, just wanted to talk about a bit about how I connected my 3D printer to the internet. 

I've been in the 3D printing thing for a while now, about a year and I haven't stopped printing ever since I bought my Ender 3. Fortunately enough, I live in a big house where my room/working place is on the fourth floor and my 3D printing is on the first one. You might be thinking as well: "OK Pablo but where do you want to bring us? Go to the point"

Well, as you might have noticed there are two floors in between my 3D printer and my room, so every time I wanted to print something new, or take a look at my printer to see if everything is going alright or take a video of my prints I would need to go down, grab the SD card, come up, put what I wanted to print in my SD card then go down again and switch the thing on and finally launch the print.

"OK Pablo, so what? You're fat move your ass you need it" well you are right, I don't say I shouldn't do more exercise, but sometimes you are just testing things and you end up going up and down like 30 times in one hour so I decided to look for a solution.

Many times you don't have to go through the pain of reinventing the wheel every time, what you want to achieve was probably solved by someone much smarter than you so you don't have to go through that hassle again, as Isaac Newton said:

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants

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I had a Raspberry Pi laying around (the one I talked about in my previous entry: https://achefethings.blogspot.com/2021/03/web-scraping-to-feed-twitter-bot.html) and so making a bit of research I came across with https://octoprint.org/ (this link deserves to be checked out not the previous one) 

The OctoPrint home webpage

OctoPrint is a software that you put into your RaspberryPi and just after a tiny bit of configuration you have it running, you just need to configure the internet connection to which it is supposed to connect, after that just plug the RaspPi into your printer and your ready to go.

OctoPrint is very cool by itself but it just allows you to manage your printer if you are connected to the same WiFi as your printer is, this wasn't my case, remember that there are two floors between myself and my printer, so I needed to keep exploring.

I noticed there were many plug-ins for OctoPrint, I looked for some useful ones and I found OctoEverywhere! (https://octoeverywhere.com/) and Octolapse (https://plugins.octoprint.org/plugins/octolapse/).

OctoEverywhere!

This one allows you to connect to your 3D printer from anywhere in the world (being given that you have an internet connection), not only that, you can see the terminal, a webcam stream, temperature information, manage your g-code repo, create time-lapses and install other plug-ins.

There is a setback if you are a greedy rat like me, the free version has some limitations such as limited stream time or limited size of g-code files. None of them are so crucial as just reloading the webpage allows you to have the stream connected again and there plug-ins to compress your g-codes to make them lighter.

Now some pictures for you to see how it looks like on my computer.

You might be wondering how the embedded timelapse thingie looks like, well honestly it is a bit crappy and this is where Octolapse comes in handy

Octolapse

Maybe you've come across one of these fancy videos where pieces seem to appear out of thin air, like this one below, if so, it was probably done with Octolapse, although there are other much more creative ways this seems to be the more used one.

Thanks to Octolapse I did this timelapse for a project I will bring you soon.

Wrap up

This is getting ridiculously long for what it was meant to be a short entry with some info about IoT, this is probably a stupid example of what you can achieve with this kind of thing. I guess to me it has meant that I am probably gonna get fatter and I am gonna move even less, for other people it will mean saving their lives applying it in hospitals, medical devices, cars or whatever.

Another stupid example in this video by one of my references when it comes about inspirations, he hacks his coffee machine to have it connected to his phone:

Some reflection I wanted to leave here, that people that talk about programming, 3D printing, IoT as if it was some kind of magic or sorcery and want to inspire other people saying big words (disruptive, the new industrial revolution, and other empty ideas), to my mind cause quite the opposite effect.

The audience will get afraid of it, and they will not even consider approaching these new technologies since they may think it is too much for their brain, I reckon they are still a bit rough to understand at first if you are not an initiated or do not have too much patience, but everyone can access it and learn, and in fact, there are many resources so money should not be an impediment either.

Now, a quick tiny update about my on-going projects, something with the 3D printer will come, I promise, something with Arduino (the open-source microcontroller Mike Boyd talks about in his video) will come too (inspired by William Osman) and something with carpentering too.

if you made it here, thank you so much I love you all

Cheers and see you next week

Pablo