Its_All.Lost
Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

Spaghetti Detective (Obico) on the Neptune 4 Max

Neptune and Obico

I have been using the Neptune 4 Max for a little over a month now. Love the printer, but it can misbehave. I have been printing for a few years now and I can count on one hand how many spaghetti monsters I have printed. That number has already been dwarfed with the addition of my N4M. While doing some research on why and how to stop it I came across the Spaghetti Detective (renamed Obico). I have heard of this many years ago and just never had a use for it, plus it costs money. I did a little more looking this time and found out you can self-host the platform to use the detective. No more paying for it. I like free. I should note that Obico does have a free tier, but it only provides 10hours of AI crunching detection.

Here’s how I installed Obico/Spaghetti Detective on my Neptune 4 Max. You should be able to follow Obico’s installation instructions and just adjusting the file paths but just in case I wrote up how I did it. I have a small Linux server (an Intel NUC) that sits in my office and runs all of my goodies. Anything that needs to run 24/7 or be accessible at all times lives there. Unfortunately while a Raspberry Pi is great for most things Obico states that they do not have enough power to run the AI software. A more robust piece of hardware is required, any old computer or laptop should work. They did just release the Pi5 so I am curious if that would work. If the machine has an NVIDIA card in it even better.

Obico released a small guide to get you started with Obico and the Neptune 4 Max with the cloud. These directions will get your printer setup for Obico. There are similar instructions below on how I did it for the self-hosted version of Obico.

[https://www.obico.io/blog/elegoo-neptune-4-and-obico-ai-3d-printing-revolution/]

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Elegoo Neptune 4 Max

Elegoo Neptune 4 Max

(UPDATED)

Let me start all of this with I am not an engineer nor an expert at 3D printing. This is all just shit that I have picked up over the years, read about or came across. I just want to spread some information and maybe help someone. Try the following at your own risk, I am not responsible for what you do. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

 

Intro

A month or so ago I upgraded my trusty old Monoprice Maker Select v2.1 to a Elegoo Neptune 4 Max. Wow. I’ve been printing non stop. This thing is a beast! Its freaking huge and it prints fast! My Monoprice is still going strong, and I actually gifted it to my son-in-law, but I needed a bigger build platform and I wanted speed. It was down to an Anycubic Kobra 2 Max or the Elegoo Neptune 4 Max. If you do your research you will find tons of posts of people that got the N4M and hated it, to return it and get the Kobra 2 Max. With just as many people who did the opposite and ended up sending the Kobra 2 Max back to get a Neptune 4 Max. I was sold on the fact that it runs Klipper. It may be an Elegoo version of Klipper but it is Klipper. There are people working on OpenNept4une, a firmware replacement for Elegoo’s Klipper. I have also heard that someone is working on a pure Debian version of community Klipper. That would be fantastic. Unfortunately this requires buying a USB to eMMC adapter to flash the machine which I don’t have. I have not done this yet and I am not sure if I will. But it is an option. You can find more information on the Elegoo Discord. Some are also upgrading the main board to something like a BTT Manta and Pi TFT50. One of the things I’ve heard when playing with the alternate firmware(s) is you may lose the functionality of the touchscreen, no bueno.

If you are new to printing or this is your first don’t expect a nice fat user manual or handbook to walk you through. You are going to have to survive off a collection of online help. Don’t expect to get a ton of super helpful customer support from a company in China like Elegoo. You are much better off on their Discord or in a Facebook group, and websites.

Even with my knowledge of the past few years it took me almost two full rolls of filament to get it dialed in. But now it prints beautifully every time, and fast. So expect to be tweaking your profile for a bit and doing lots of bed leveling and printing lots of first layer sheets and benchys along with XYZCubes. Run the tests, it helps.

The following is a mash up of some tips I have tried and figured out, or I have read about and found online.

Some of these steps may seem tedious or you just don’t want to do them, but it will save you time, headache, and filament – which is money. When I first started out for the longest time I never wanted to “waste” time with the calibration prints. Trust me you waste more time by not doing them. Orca makes it easy now anyway.

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OctoPrint-TFT on a Raspberry Pi

octoprint-tft

So I have been seeing the new kid on the block pop up a lot recently, no not that shitty fucking band. This is a new “plugin” for the famous and awesome OctoPrint, OctoPi actually – OctoPrint-TFT. I have seen the screenshots and it is looking slick I must say. A while back I tried to use the OctoPrint TouchUI plugin and didn’t have much luck with it, in the end as the Pi I had at the time was a lower model and I just found the responsiveness just too slow. Plus this gives it a nice TFT feel like it was stock and meant to be. Le’s try it. I am gonna use the same waveshare 3.5″ LCD screen I had before but this time a newer Raspberry Pi 3B+. So I wont need a WiFi dongle this time either cause its built-in.

 

Parts used

  • Raspberry Pi 3 B+
  • Waveshare 3.5″ LCD TFT screen
  • A micro SD card of course
  • Power supply and cord for the Pi
  • USB cable to connect the Pi to the printer
  • A 3D printer lol
  • A computer with some sort of SSH program or a screen and keyboard/mouse to work directly off the Pi (might work I am not sure, I used a terminal on my mac and SSH’d into the Pi).

 

Let’s Party

Let’s follow the directions from the Github page and see what happens?

After installing a fresh copy of OctoPi v0.16 I started the Github directions.

 

The file is actually “/etc/octoprint-tft-environment” not the location.

sudo nano /etc/octoprint-tft-environment
(this tidbit copied form the github page)

The basic configuration is handled via environment variables, if you are using the  .deb package you can configure it at  /etc/octoprint-tft-environment.

  • OCTOPRINT_CONFIG_FILE – Location of the OctoPrint’s config.yaml file. If empty the file will be searched at the  pi home folder or the current user. Only used for locally installed OctoPrint servers.
  • OCTOPRINT_HOST – OctoPrint HTTP address, example  http://localhost:5000, if OctoPrint is locally installed will be read from the config file.
  • OCTOPRINT_APIKEY – OctoPrint-TFT expects an API key to be supplied. This API key can be either the globally configured one or a user specific one if “Access Control”. if OctoPrint is locally installed will be read from the config file.
  • OCTOPRINT_TFT_STYLE_PATH – Several themes are supported, and style configurations can be done through CSS. This variable defines the location of the application theme.
  • OCTOPRINT_TFT_RESOLUTION – Resolution of the application, should be configured to the resolution of your screen, for example  800x480. By default  480x320.

So go to the browser on your working machine that you use and go to the Pies IP address and go thru the OctoPrint setup fun. Once done grab an API key from the config menu on OctoPrint and lets edit that config file for the OctoPrint-TFT.

Do a find -name "config.yaml" on your Pi and you will find the location of yours. Add that to the config. Host should be http://localhost . The API you grabbed from the config menu slap that where it needs to go. I left the last two alone.

It has come a long way since the last time I tried to get this screen to work. This time its is really freaking easy!

This should install with the screen to boot with the bottom being the power plug, if you want it the other way do this instead

Reboot your Raspberry Pi and make sure you get video on your LCD.

If your screen is not rotated correctly with the above command still, do the following.

And change the line for your display to add :rotate=270 as shown below

The Pi rebooted after downloading some files and holy shit! The screen is working, well it showed the boot up sequence and a login prompt. Let’s get touch working and the desktop.

sudo reboot

Let’s see?

Boot up sequence and…login prompt. Ugh. sudo raspi-config to desktop? That loads and wants lightdm, so no. TFT wants xserver, so its gonna get xserver. Lets Google and I mead Reddit. Google didn’t have shit, too new still. Found it.

Let’s try this.

He has an extras step after installing OctoPrint-TFT.

Lastly we need to remove the 99-fbturbo.conf file from our Xorg directory he says.

Now on reboot OctoPrint-TFT should load and start attempting to connect says he?

Fucken eh right it did! If you see the Octoprint image but the error says

Unexpected error: Get /api/connection: unsupported protocol scheme

As mentioned earlier I found out on the Github issues page it was mentioned there to add “http://” to the config file instead of just localhost. So make sure you did that.

If you see the “Connecting to OctoPrint” and it never goes away, don’t wait too long! It simply means it has no connection to a 3D printer at that moment. You MUST plug it in for the TFT to do its job and actually work. Incredibly confusing I know. Hopefully they’ll fix that soon, and change the message soon.

After playing with it for a few minutes (no actual printing done) I find it pretty neat, and may possibly use it in the future if my LCD screen ever loses functionality for some reason. I could disable the control boxes screen lets say and enable more features in Marlin, after I did upgrade my firmware. But I am not too sure. Requiring the tethered connection to the Pi is a drawback for me, thats way more plugs sticking out of a screen than I would like. If I had the 7″ screen to hide the goop maybe, but this wasn’t designed for those. It was perfect size on the 480×320 I ave.

Or if I do some crazy new board installed over the Melzi and I don’t have a screen. I could use this. I wanted to try Klipper out and that loses the screen but I don’t think there is support for it just yet. I am not willing to try it out at this point in time.

But that was my trick to get OctoPrint-TFT to work on my Waveshare 3.5″ TFT screen and Raspberry Pi 3 B+. Hope it helps.

 

The perfect Raspberry Pi enclosure

The perfect Raspberry Pi enclosure

There are many and I mean many Raspberry Pi cases out there. Fucking tons. There are a few great ones and a lot of mediocre ones. I came across a pretty good one. It is a great case and not just because it looks cool. It’s actually function-able. The case is designed to fit a VESA monitor mount. So if you have a TV or monitor on a stand you could bolt this to the rear and bam!. The holes are also great for general purpose mounting. The case is designed slightly different than all the others out there. There is NO CUTOUT for the micro USB power plug. We don’t use it here. This case has room for a DC-DC buck converter. Available on Amazon, eBay and all over. Standard part.

We take a nice big fat power source like 12v DC 3A and knock it down to 5.1v DC for the Pi. Then we wire that output directly to the Pies GPIO pins for 5v and GND. This works great, a nice fat stable power source. And the bricks are far easier to get a hold of then a 3A 5v USB plug. I have tons of them lying around.

DC-DC Buck Converter

 

We take the barrel plug and solder in a diode to the source side of the DC-DC buck converter. We take the output and apply that to the power GPIO pins for 5v and GND. Then we take a LED and wire in a 330ohm resistor and connect that to GND and GPIO 14 (UART TXD). Heres the trick to get the GPIO pin to follow the Pies power up and power down cycle. So the LED will turn off when the Pi is safe to unplug.

Edit your /boot/config.txt file and add the following line:

enable_uart=1

Thats it, now the LED will light when powered on and it will shutoff when it is safe to unplug the Pi. If you wish to use a different pin other than 14 you can follow this guide over here.

The case

Heres the thingy for my modified version of the case. The original calls for brass inserts for the screws, which is awesome I just don’t use them. So I remixed the files to use standard M3 screws. No more brass inserts. I also increased the depth of the lid. My jumper wires were hitting the top of the  lid and preventing me from closing it. No I have plenty of room fire wires and jumpers.

My Remixed Case

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2956874

Original Version

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2286741

 

Creating a mini NES with a Raspberry Pi

Mini NES RetroPie
Mini NES RetroPie
Mini NES RetroPie

It all started with the Nintendo Classic craze. I had a friend that was rambling about one the other day. I mentioned that I could totally make him one but better because it would emulate more than just Nintendo. Enter RetroPie. I was looking at putting the bill of materials together and thinking of cases for the mini NES, then I realized why not just print one! So BAM and BAM.

 

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1887826 
then this https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2011955 

Then this for giggles
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1710104

 

Here’s what we are doing

  1. Flashing RetroPie to an SD card for a Raspberry Pi
  2. Soldering header pins to the RUN pin holes on the RPi
  3. Soldering wires to some push buttons
  4. Soldering some wires to an LED
  5. 3D Printing a mini NES case for the RPi
  6. 3D Printing a bracket for the NES case
  7. Glueing push buttons, LED and bracket into the printed case
  8. Wiring the LED and buttons to the RPi
  9. Testing it all

 

Here’s what you need

  1. Raspberry Pi (save yourself a headache, get a RPi 3!)
  2. RPi power supply MINIMUM of 2.5A!
  3. SD card 8gb+ class 10
  4. HDMI cable
  5. USB keyboard
  6. Network cable (even though the RPi 3 has wifi you will at least need to do the initial wifi setup with a LAN connection)
  7. A 3D Printer to print the case and the bracket
  8. (2) push buttons
  9. (2) male header pins
  10. Super glue and hot glue
  11. (1) red LED
  12. (1) 100 ohm resistor
  13. (6) pieces of jumper wire with connections (you can cut some in half if long enough)

 

Whats Up

I will assume you have a network connection (non wifi) a USB keyboard a TV or Monitor or tv with an HDMI connection and that you have active internet. You will need to know how to solder, and be somewhat comfortable with a terminal and hopefully the Linux environment. I also assume you have and know how to use a 3D printer. I will also assume that you know and are comfortable with Raspberry Pies. Lots of ASSumptions.

This post is not designed as a how to install RetroPie but more of a how to get RetroPie installed and create the scripts for shutdown the Pi and lighting the LED, then you can follow the first install guide by RetroPie to get you going with the actual RetroPie software.

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I am not responsible for any damage that may happen to you, your computer, or your Raspberry Pi etc. Take this adventure at your own risk.