hello, I have question about octoprint. I am printing at the moment but the ethernet cable is blocking some objects, can I safely remove it?? I don't want to stop the print, does it still print when it doesn't have internet??
Octoprint allows you to MONITOR and CONTROL your printer
It is not REQUIRED to PRINT on your printer, but you lose the ability to keep an eye on your print
I don't know what printer you have, but, for 99.99% of all the personal 3D printers out there, you should be able to safely remove the cable with no ill effects to your printer or your print
Caveat: If you've setup a telegram plugin to periodically send you notices and the networking is now off, it may pile up so many errors that it negatively affects the job.
I didn't consider plugins in my answer. You're right of course
Anything you've added to Octoprint, which DOES require network access, could cause hitherto unforeseen problems
- OctoPrint itself doesn't require internet access to function, apart from installing plugins / update checks. Some 3rd party plugins do, and they can break all of OctoPrint when denied access. That's something you'll have to take up with the plugin authors.
- OctoPrint doesn't even require network access to function, it is quite happy to function on an isolated machine with a screen attached to it (provided the hardware is suitable enough to handle running octoprint and a web browser, I wouldn't recommend using a pi zero for this). The down side to this being you obviously loose all the remote monitoring functionality.
- Plugging or unplugging the USB cable that goes to your printer is bad news. "Duh" I hear you say, but if you're running a print off the printer's SD card, you might be tempted to unplug that USB cable, don't. Some / most 3d printer controllers are still based on Arduino's and will reset on any sort of serial activity.
So, plugging or unplugging the ethernet cable only cuts off OctoPrint's network access, it doesn't affect its ability to send data to the printer. Vanilla OctoPrint has no reliance on external connections to the internet apart from when you install plugins or it tries to check for updates / blacklisted plugins. OctoPrint could function just fine on an isolated machine with no network access, which is why some people have noticed their Raspberry Pi device drops off the network due to bad wifi signal strength etc, but continues to print just fine.
I have a script that checks, and if necessary cycles, my wifi connection every minute because the connection is so bad in the print room. OctoPrint routinely looses network connectivity and has never been negatively affected in my own experience.
Just for the pedantic out there... I once created a RedHat Linux box for the purpose of developing something in the world of XSL-FO and needed to park that project for a month so I just unplugged the ethernet cable from that server and thought nothing of it.
A month later, I returned to a crashed server. Every second, the system was reporting the network error condition to a log file which eventually filled up the system partition. It took a fair bit of effort to fix that.
The difference I think is that allow-hotplug eth0 command in your /etc/network/interfaces. If it's not there then the computer gets a little panicky and can eventually fill up your partition with its logging attempts.