Using a Micro PC to control a reprap printer

I thought the community would be interested to know that I have just finished commissioning a UDoo Quad micro pc as the controller to manage my Reprap Pro Mendel Tricolour.

If anyone does not know about it, the UIdoo Quad is based upon the Freescale I.MX 6 ARM Cortex-A9 Quad Core CPU, running at 1Ghz, with 1Gb of DDR3 RAM and amongst other features it has HDMI, WifI, ethernet and SATA interfaces. It runs Linux off of a microSD card, although you can arrange (as I have) for the bulk of the operating system to be loaded on a SATA connected Hard Drive.

I running Pronterface connected to the printer via USB, and am using a 7 inch HDMI display, which I had quite a bit of 'fun' getting to work properly.

The installation has enabled my to recover quite a bit of desk space that was previously occupied by a cheap lap top dedicated to do the job.

I would hasen to add that I have no connections with the UDoo project (see www.udoo.org).

Regards Harvey

I have a UDOO quad sitting around collecting dust.

Did you document your process anywhere?

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- akhlut

Just remember - Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

[myhomelessmind.blogspot.com]

I haven't formally documented the process, but after this week end, I'll write some notes here.

H

HarveyC:

I am working on doing the same thing but with a Beaglebone Black. Here is a photo. The enclosure includes the BBB, a USB Hub, an Arduino that talks to a remote control, and the 7 inch LCD. The BBB can run Slic3r and Pronterface in their graphical forms but too slowly for my patience. I am going to continue to slice my prints on my iMac and use a custom app running on the BBB to drive the Printrun command line printer controller. The app is not quite done but is written in Javascript and Node. It automatically picks up files from the iMac and queues them for printing. The interface allows access to the same functionality as Pronterface but on a touch screen with a remote control (which you can see in front of the printer on the first image). The web interface can also be run from anywhere else on the network, including from my iPad. The app is at the 80% point now but needs some cleaning up. Once it is functionally complete to a first version I am going to add a couple features including a webcam to watch the print bed. The case and mounts are, of course, prints!

Wisar

Hi.
i have start the Project in the Beta stadium.
I have Problems with the GPU Kernel Modul.
In the end of this week i hope to resolve it and make it stable.

Look here:
[sourceforge.net]

[forums.reprap.org]
[forums.reprap.org]

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Mein Club: [hackerspace-ffm.de]
RADDS-Shield -> Commercial [max3dshop.org]

Any update? I installed Printrun on Ubuntu 12.04 distro. Printrun works fine my problem is to get tty serial to the arduino mega.
Please post your solution.

Cheers

I have given up on mine because of the frustrations of Linux. Printrun worked fine and the serial connection to the Melzi board worked well, but no matter how much I tried (and I spend many, many hours on this), I could not get the smb networking to work reliably, which meant that I could not reliably connect the thing to my main (Windows) PC.

I now have a paper back sized mini pc running Windows 8.1 for the job. This did everything I wanted 'out of the box' with none of the previous frustrations.

Harvey

Quote

I could not get the smb networking to work reliably

There are plenty of other options: SSL file system, SCP, FTP, NFS, even a web server is pretty trivial to set up on a Linux distro.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Thanks for that information. I'ive been involved with PC systems since they first became available (and with cpm/mpm systems before that!), both on a professional level, and since I retired some 12 years ago, on a private level, and over the years I have had various 'goes' at Linux, but every time I end up wasting a lot of time and not getting very far. The problem is that, Linux systems just don't come together very easily and you always seem to end up needing complex command lines to get things working as you want them.

This was my recent experience with the UDOO. I just wanted something to work simply, and without diverting too much of my time from actually using my printer. Don't get me wrong here, its a smashing little 'box', and once I had got it booting from a hard drive, installed Pronterface with all of its dependencies, and sorted out the screen resolution (I was using a 7 inch HDMI monitor), the basic system worked well, starting quickly and connecting to the printer with no trouble at all. But all this must have taken me a couple of days with much searching on the internet to get the required information. Samba worked, but not reliably, and I just could not sort this one out (from searching on the internet it seems that this is not uncommon). In contrast, the Windows system that I implemented (which was a brand new installation, installing Windows myself from a fresh distribution), just worked reliably without any 'fiddling' about and was up and running within a couple of hours.

Harvey

Is the hardware network connection reliable? I found my UDOO has very little WIFI sensitivity so I have to use a cable.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I found the wifi was pretty stable, but I could not get SAMBA to connect on start up, nor could I get it to connect reliably when I asked it to. Unfortunately I HAVE to use wifi for the network connection here because my hobby room is upstairs and the router is downstairs.

I ended up with an MSI Windbox (1.8Ghz Intel Celeron, 4gb ram, 500gb Hard Disk, WiFi, Bluetooth etc). Initially I put Ubuntu 14 LTS on this. But I had similar problems with Samba, so I bit the bullet and purchased a copy of Windows 8.1, and as I indicated above, this just worked 'out of the box'. It might be me, because I have a LOT of experience of Windows and relatively little of Linux, but I do find Linux frustrating.

Since I did the installation I've upgraded the screen to a 10.1 inch one as my eyesight is not as good as it used to be and I was finding the 7 inch a bit if a struggle.

Harvey

Running a ReRapPro Mendel Tricolour by the way.

Have you looked into OctoPrint running on a Raspberry Pi? This solution requires no configuration other than setting up your WiFi. The image that is downloaded is ready to run with no other modifications. You require a Raspberry Pi, a power supply, a WiFi dongle, and an SD card to put the image on. Works great.

-Matt

My problem with Octoprint is that it does not support multiple extruders (I have 3 on my Mendel).

H