Electronics for Everyone

[irvshapiro]

With the availability of the Raspberry Pie single board computer system for about $50 and Arduino single-chip computers and consumer-friendly systems like the Circuit Playground Express practical electronic builds are available to non-engineers. Many schools are using these systems to teach children about building with electronics starting in elementary school. This forum is dedicated to discussions of these and other consumer-friendly electronic products.

[Maximo101]

I have heard about raspberry pies for years, but never really looked into them. This maybe something I now look into since I have a 3d printer.

[[email protected]]

You really should get Octoprint set up for your printer. Dr. Vax has a good video on this. You will learn something about the Pi and really improve your ease of control of the printer. No more micro SD cards.

[bspill]

Have a rasberry pi 4 and still have not been able to get it on the network.

[RC Hamer]

Have you enabled SSH and used the Ethernet port to hook to your network? You can then log in via SSH and finish the configuration.

[Geit]

Once you installed the desired system onto the SD card, you can edit a text file on the boot partition to preset your wireless network. It is in the fat format and can be mounted with any operation system. So just plug the SD card into your PC, Mac, Amiga whatever, edit the text file, put it back and boot the pi.

[[email protected]]

If you are trying to access via WI-FI, you might try hooking up with an either net cable and see if that works. There are a number of settings that need to be entered for wi-fi. Let us know if that works.

[bspill]

Thanks. I'll give it a try.

[Vassili Finellis]

Rasberry Pi and Arduino among other Programmable boards, are very usefull in 3D printers as well! I use them both even for printing monitoring, computer unit replacement etc. Ras Pi can be used for making MSLA or SLA 3d Printers saccesfully. I use them a lot!

[Ender5r]

Question: Can a Pi be used to actually run the printer? I'm thinking not, simply because I don't think a stock Pi has stepper motor drivers (although there's probably some addon you can get 😉).

[[email protected]]

You are correct. It can not run the printer directly, but it can interface to the printer control board and run that. Octoprint, or Astroprint both accomplish that task and do it well.

[Vassili Finellis]

Question: Can a Pi be used to actually run the printer? I'm thinking not, simply because I don't think a stock Pi has stepper motor drivers (although there's probably some addon you can get 😉).

Well, yes and no and let me explain. As a computer board it can controll many external devices such as printer controllers BUT, if you use add ons such as shields ( cnc shields ), you could run a printer from basic to advanced mode depending on your programming skills! I haven't yuse it to run a FFF printer ....yet. I run SLS and MSLA printers successfully.

[Vassili Finellis]

Here is an example .....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u35L0jGCqFc

[RC Hamer]

Some other great boards to look at include the ESP8266 and the ESP32. They include great WiFi capabilities, flexible IO, and best of all they can be programmed via the Arduino IDE.

[Vassili Finellis]

Here is a Hat for RasPi to run a printer https://reprapworld.eu/products/elec..._raspberry_pi/

[Geit]

Raspberry Pis are very nice. I have three connected to my printers (Pi1, 2xPi2 (OctoPrint)), a PI1 as my entrance camera (MotionEye), a PI3 with PiHole (keeps my network advert free) and a PI4 as a media center (Kodi) mounted on the back of a 24" Display.

The only downside when buying a Raspberry Pi is that they don´t come with a spare. Every time you buy one, you have exactly one PI less, than you need.

[Vassili Finellis]

The only downside when buying a Raspberry Pi is that they don´t come with a spare. Every time you buy one, you have exactly one PI less, than you need.

Same as Arduino...

[Geit]

Nah, I have two Arduinos laying around and no idea what to do with them.

[Vassili Finellis]

Nah, I have two Arduinos laying around and no idea what to do with them.

You could combine them with RasPi board as doghter boards as well!