Enabling your Raspberry Pi as a server for your 3d printer!

Note: this guide is far from complete. In fact, you wont even get it running the way you really want. Pronterfaces 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 ne)

Pi-Bot

First things rst. 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 conguration menu. Check your settings and most importantly: enable SSH connections! Also use the SD card partition resizer. Reboot after youve 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, its time to do some updates: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade This will take a little while. After that, its 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 its okay to download and use diskspace. Sure it is. Now weve got a complete set of Python tools and the Git system, which will download Pronterface for us!

Well 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 Pis 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:

Pis IP adress:8080

You should get a hello world. Press control+C afterwards to exit CherryPys 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 rst 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-le. Also, the webinterface is online at the adress you specied at http.cong. 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 havent got it operational just yet (a lot of dependencies and stuff required).