I’m a huge fan of octoprint on raspberry pi. I’m not a huge fan of raspberry pi lately. I’ve heard of le potato and orange pi. Some searching shows that people have done it on both of those.
Does anyone have any experience running it on a small board computer other than raspi?
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I run OctoPrint in a docker container on my home server. They have an official docker image available. And they also have a docker-compose.yaml file available.
I’m quite happy with the setup. The server is more stable (for me) than a small board computer. I have the whole setup on a UPS. Management is dead simple. The only caveat is that the server and printer need to be fairly close to each other for the USB connection. In my setup that was already a given, they sit less than a foot apart because of where I wanted them.
I have wanted to try out Klipper , and may well do that in docker as well, but my printer is a proprietary nightmare and Klipper isn’t currently an option.
I want to do this myself (to both free up my pi and not have to deal with underpower warnings) but my printer is a bit further away. I’ve had my eye on those USB via UTP devices for a while but a cursory search seems to imply there’d be timing issues.
I’ve found
LePotatois great, as long as my use case fits the processor speed.LibreComputer(maker ofLePotato) also offers Renegade for a bit more oompf.The downside is that there’s far fewer pre built images available. The saving grace is that stock
Armbianis fantastic, and can often be upgraded to match the pre built image I want with a fewaptcommands.Edit: I haven’t run
OctoPrintonLePotatobut my educated guess is that it would run just fine.When using
Armbianto host projects similar toOctoPrint, I have needed to follow theInstall from Sourceinstructions from the project site. The experience wasn’t terrible, for me, but I am really good at getting stuff to compile.I have run OctoPrint on a LePotato, and it runs absolutely fine for me. It feels responsive and good, though I have no frame of reference for comparison.
Installing it was easy, as there was a simple guide and program available. :::
Yeah LibreComputer boards have become my go to SBC now, if you’re fine headless the debian minimal image they offer is solid base image. I use Kiauh to handle my klipper setups, makes setting up klipper and related super simple, I think I recall an option to install octoprint with it as well.
To answer the direct question - no
I do have some thoughts on moving away from the Pi though - warning, heavy personal bias ahead…
If you’re looking at moving away from the Pi I would just suggest a low power x86 box, like a Nuc or some Intel N100 low-power tiny PC.
There is a caveat though - it looks like the OctoPi project only provides OS builds for the Pi, so if you change systems it looks like you’ll need to install OctoPrint manually, and port over your config somehow.
On ebay you can get second-hand NUCs, 6th gen and up, for practically peanuts. The cheaper quad core celeron nucs (i.e. J3455) are roughly equivalent to the 3rd and 4th gen dual-core i5s (3777u, 3230m etc) performance wise, but have an updated QuickSync encoder and support accelerated 4K video encoding/playback, handy if you want to capture timelapses of your prints or just view them live. They also consume 1/3rd of the power at around 10 watts under the same workload.
ARM support for other vendors can be pretty flaky, sometimes even non existent. While you could pick an Orange Pi, and go with a modern community-supported distro like Armbian, it isn’t a turnkey experience like the Pi. There is much less documentation, and still some very early boards floating around with hardware defects and overheating issues (posing a fire risk in the worst case, the OPi Zero being the most egregious - literally melting the optional enclosure and killing the NIC). Some research before buying will let you know most of what you need to know - check around the forums for any common issues and dealbreakers, as well as the manufacturer’s site to get an idea of available support.
If you want to get an idea of the alternatives you could check out Jeff Geerling’s youtube channel, he covers the Pi and occasionally videos on other alternatives, as well as issues he’s had with them and support. I’ll try and link some below…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KghZIgkKZcs
Check the comments on that one for a quick synopsis, as the video is quite long…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjzvh-bfV-E
This video pretty much just echoes my current perspective
I will second this recommendation. The main purpose of the SBCs is running Linux with easy access to GPIO pins. If you are using USB just run off of a small x86 machine and avoid the hassle.
I have an orange pi zero 2 and run Obico’s octoprint image on it. Works great.
Orange Pi has disappointed me. I bought an (IIRC) Orange Pi 5B.
There is no sane “boot from SD” button to hold so if there is an SD card in it it tries to boot from that unconditionally. Even if the SD card is not bootable. This might be a dealbreaker for you because it would be nice to have an Octoprint board with expandable storage that didn’t act stupid. That’s what I wanted.
One of the USB ports is also just removeded. Putting anything in it knocks out the entire USB bus on that side of the board until a restart.
I won’t be buying another board from them.
Intel N100 mini PC*.
*= those are on the same process node as the problematic i7/i9 13th and 14th gen CPU. With Intel this quiet on the true cause/issue they might as well also be considered faulty.
Weren’t they pretty straight up saying it was a microcode issue with a patch coming out? Affecting 65 watt+ CPUs which also wasn’t in the limelight since only the high end i7/i9 CPUs were seeing significant failures being reported. I’d imagine a mini PC would be pretty safe.
At this point, it is not a technical issue but also a trust issue:
They started with people overclocking their CPUs and that is the cause.
They moved on to the mainboard vendors are the bad guy.
Now they are at we screwed up but the microcode update will fix everything and yes we had oxidation issues we told nobody about and no we won’t recall those units we know are faulty (oxidation issue).
only the high end i7/i9 CPUs were seeing significant failures being reported
I think Intel now says it is everything with 65W+ TDP.
They confirmed that there was a range of CPUs affected by a fabrication issue outside of the press release that went to media. So while we know about the i7/i9, manufacturing process is often shared between different CPU models and with Intel being opaque about what they found it’s hard to understand what actually happened and what’s truly unaffected.
Ref: GamersNexus
https://youtu.be/OVdmK1UGzGs
I’m in camp Klipper and built my printer during the PI shortage. I did find a non-scalped PI400 (the one with a built in keyboard), but my fallback was going to be an x86 based SBC. They’re cheap and readily available. I suspect one would work well with octoprint.
I agree. If the printer can run klipper firmware, I find mainsail/klippper to be far superior to octoprint. I started with octoprint and stock manufacturer FW on my printer, but it’s just such a significantly better product and UX with klipper FW and managing with mainsail.
Ive been running octoprint on an android phone reliably for a bit now.
The camera didn’t work perfectly for a reason I forget now though, so I use another ipcamera to watch the print
I have it running on a Libre Computer Renegade (kind of a big brother to Le Potato)
It works really well for me. Not sure about now, but when I set it up there wasn’t a way to get the actual Octoprint image to boot on it, so I used Octoprint Deploy.
Just curious what your issue with raspberry pi is?
There was a period where they were hard to get. Then they strayed from their roots about being affordable, simple computer. The mission as it started isn’t what they do anymore. It’s lost its luster.
There aren’t any alternatives that follow the RPi’s original mission, they’re all for-profit. And I’m not sure you’ll find a more affordable board than the $15 Pi Zero 2.
