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Can you recommend raspberry pi / octopi alternatives? (lemm.ee)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I've found LePotatois great, as long as my use case fits the processor speed.

LibreComputer (maker of LePotato) 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 Armbian is fantastic, and can often be upgraded to match the pre built image I want with a few apt commands.

Edit: I haven't run OctoPrint on LePotato but my educated guess is that it would run just fine.

When using Armbian to host projects similar to OctoPrint, I have needed to follow the Install from Source instructions from the project site. The experience wasn't terrible, for me, but I am really good at getting stuff to compile.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

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. :::

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

The up side to SBC computers is also their low power consumption. Something like a Pi is half the power consumption of an N100 PC, in addition to being half the cost. If you only need 1/1000th the CPU then why pay all this extra money and use all this extra power to gain nothing?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Ah, but the thing is there are older platforms than the N100 that are still faster and more expandable than a rPi.

I have an AliExpress eWaste special that's a N3350, 6gb of RAM, and 64gb of eMMC storage which was ~$50.

About the same price as a new Pi, somewhat better performance than a Pi, and at about 4w idle, roughly the same power as a new Pi. Full load is closer to 10w, but we're talking 3 or maybe 4w more than the Pi in a relatively rare situation for a lot of Pi use cases.

And, of course, at full clocks, it's faster than a Pi4 so you are getting something for those watts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

older platforms

And use more power. If you're just doing octoprint then a full ass PC is kinda silly.

It's not the pandemic anymore so you can find pis all over the place for their proper price. My local micro center has 25+ zero ws in stock for $8 and that should be plenty for running octoprint. The Zero 2W $15 (current none in stock) and 3A+ $25 (1 in stock) are also a really good values. Even if you go for the Pi4 you can still find the base model for $35 here and there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Compared to the power consumption of your 3D printer itself, the wattage drawn by an x86 mini-PC system is a rounding error. What, 19 watts burst under "boost" conditions, and 3 to 7 watts otherwise?

My Qidi X-Max 3 draws roughly 250 watts when printing basic PLA and its hotend and plate are at temperature. During preheat it can touch 400. And that's without the chamber heater -- that alone is rated a 300 watts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Sure while the printer is going, but are you ever going to turn the computer off? I'm sure as hell not going to which is why idle consumption matters so much to me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Why not? When I was using a Pi to run my old printer via Octoprint, I turned the whole shebang off at the power strip when I wasn't using it. The Pi doesn't have a power button, so it was easiest to just killswitch the entire kit and kaboodle.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

A second hand NUC is quite a bit cheaper than a pi once you factor in power supply, storage and case. They're also not as power hungry as you suggest. My entire smarthome is powered by an old NUC running Proxmox with HA in a VM and some LXCs (adguard among other things), and it pulls a meager 7W on average, that's only a few more than a pi and it has a 3ghz quadcore CPU, 16gb ram and 1tb NVME, so it has all the overhead you need to do small projects on the side with it as well.

Unless you need the GPIO, an SBC is pretty much never the best solution anymore.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you plan on doing a lot with the machine then yeah it does make sense to get something better than a Pi. But for just octoprint any Pi is plenty.

SD cards are a couple dollars, the pi 3 and below will run on any usb power brick. The 4 and 5 will run on any not low power brick you have lying around, but even if you feel the need to buy one the official one is like $15, and you can reuse it for other things too. And you can always 3d print a case if that's really a problem, but I just let my pis dangle there, or I put them back in their box.

Also second hand pis exist too, if you're really strapped for cash you can get a full pi, case, sd card, and power supply for about the price of just the pi new. During the pandemic when Pis weren't in stock I got a full setup for a pi 3 + this bluetooth keyboard trackpad thingy for $30.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

But for 15$ more, you get an immensely more useful tool for when you (probably) inevitably want to do more/other things. SD cards for a few bucks burn out really quickly, so you'd really want a good one (significantly more expensive) or an SSD, bringing the total cost of a pi above a used NUC, with worse specs all around.

I really can't see the argument, neither financial, performance/watt or performance/$ for an SBC if you don't need GPIOs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

(probably) inevitably

That's the key here, not everyone wants to do that. OP specifically asked for something to run octoprint, not an entire homelab. Not everyone is interested in that.

[–] ilovededyoupiggy 5 points 4 months ago

I have an orange pi zero 2 and run Obico's octoprint image on it. Works great.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

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 fucked. 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] Sethayy 3 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Just curious what your issue with raspberry pi is?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Ajen 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

@Ajen @GrayBackgroundMusic can confirm Pi Zero 2 runs Octopi nicely. Tried running it on old pc thin clients but not sure I recommend due to the faff/webcam issues. Am also dabbling with android phones with some success...