Garden Railway Forum

philipy wrote: ↑Sun Oct 15, 2023 11:41 am

-steves- wrote: ↑Sun Oct 15, 2023 11:06 am
If you intend to shutdown the printer and not the PI make sure you use a USB voltage blocker or you will definitely get issues, this is essential. Philip is OK as he powers both up and down at the same time. This is where I got mine in the UK.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/PortaPow-USB-P ... C68&sr=8-3

Yep, I have one of those as well, to be sure, otherwise you get reverse power from the printer to the Pi. You can find all sorts of workarounds on the web, including the appropriate pinstape in the socket or 'surgery' to disconnect the appropriate pins, but I decided to do it properly with this.

I cut a USB extension cable in half and soldered a piece of veroboard to the data and shield (electrically connected to the -ve wires leaving the +ve wire) cut and covered with heat shrink, the veroboard is covered in heatshrink.

I use "system shutdown" last night but have not turned either printer or pi back on.

I will put an SD card into the printer, I thought that having one in would interfere with octoprint as the one I use is only for stl transfer didn't think anything was written to it.

Put an SD card into the printer (will be left in slot), powered up the pi and the printer, then opened octoprint all went well so that is the sequence I will use in future.

I now have 2 instances of octoprint working on 2 separate printers (one raspberry pi for each).
Getting them both working has been a big learning curve, the biggest issue I had was getting "SD init fail" messages, to overcome this I left an SD card in the slot at all times.
After getting my second printer (Ender3 V3SE) up and running I noticed that I did not get the messages even if there was no SD card in the slot.
I did a bit of research and came across this "If your using jyers firmware, nothing needs to be on sd card. If stock firmware all your settings are saved on it."
This confused me a bit but then I realised that the V3SE auto sets the z offset prior to each print so that there appears to be no need for Z offset settings to be on an SD card.
As I am using Jyers firmware on the Ender3 V2 I should not need an SD card in its slot as well if the statement is true.

I asked a question about SD init fail on the Octoprint forum and was advise to go into settings/features and disable SD card support and the issue will go away as octoprint will not go looking for the sd card.

I am going to try this and see how I go.

This is my new printer setup.
I managed to a real estate grab after SWMBO decided not to do card making again and get then inside out of the shed

Dry Boxes Octoprint Raspberry pi box and Etherent hub Printers

Nice setup Graeme. Similar to mine ( without the ethernet ) but much neater and tidier!

philipy wrote: ↑Sat Oct 28, 2023 9:23 am Nice setup Graeme. Similar to mine ( without the ethernet ) but much neater and tidier!

Thanks Philip,