I'm thinking to start using octoprint and from what I've seen, the most popular single board computer for it is Raspberry Pi, but nowadays there are a lot of alternatives available.
I would like to know if you are running it on a different hardware, or tried to, what is your experience, recommendations, suggestions? I found this post from last year, but it wasn't of much help: Raspberry Pi alternatives.
What would you recommend instead of RPI and why? I'm also looking at cutting costs, but not cutting corners.
The Pi is probably going to be the most cost effective option out there. I have seen some guys in Discord mention they have it running on odroid devices, old laptops, intel nuc devices, etc. It will pretty much run on anything that can run windows/mac/linux. There has recently even been development on an Android based one that utilizes OTG usb connection to your printer. Haven't seen an APK for that one yet, but Filip was the Discord user discussing it.
Thank you, I have been reading about that. This post was intended to find out if other users are running Octoprint on other Raspberry Pi alternatives (such as Orange Pi, or others available), mainly thinking about performance issues, compatibility (yes, Octoprint will run on anything, but any issues with the hardware, or limitations?).
At this moment, RPI 3 B+ seems the most straightforward option, but I'd really like to see what others are using.
What were you hoping to achieve? Better performance? Cheaper price? Novel features? Chances are, by volumes of Pis sold compared to alternatives, most people will use PIs.
I do not know what I was hoping to achieve, but this is why I asked the question, to find an answer. Somewhat, you provided one answer to my question, thank you.
Maybe other users will provide other answers.
Of course the raspberry pi was developed as a low cost educational tool, The success in the hobby and commercial markets were obviously higher than they originally anticipated.
I will always says raspberry pi but then I am biased as I run a raspberry pi Foundation code club in my local school, own 8 BBC Micros (the original computers in school program and inventors of ARM) and worked at a certain University in Cambridge for years, just down the road from ARM.... (before it was sold off).
I use orange-pi for all my printers. I had to add a cooling fan on the on the lite because it locks up once a week. I use the Orange pi zero and it works fine. I use a short USB-printer cable and Velcro them to the printer. I color code the octoprint theme to match the case I print so that I start the correct printer. Only issues I have had was weak power supply issues giving the under voltage error. Solved this by beefing up the printer PSU and getting the power straight from the printers power.
all you need additionally is ram and a cheap mini-itx case with an integrated psu.
And you may want to change the cheap thermal pad to good thermal paste.
I have used 2 orange pi lite running armbian linux with the octoprint installed manually. I now run a modded chromebook running ubuntu with octoprint installed on my jgaurora A5 and have just switched my anet a8 to a PandaPi v2.5 which uses a Raspberry pi 3b+ or a 4 as both the octoprint server and the printer processor (pretty cool little board using the 64bit processor on the pi to run the printer). The old chromebook is great as I like having control of the printers right next to the machines. The chromebook was free and was end of life so I flashed the bios and loaded linux.
I tried to use orange pi lites. They restarted after ~2h of print. No idea if bad usb cable, bad power management, or overheat, but I don't recommend them...
However for cheap and powerful alternatives I would recommend the " Acute Angle AA - B4 Mini PC" (its ~160 usd on gearbest right now). 4 core Intel (N3450) CPU, 8gb ram, 128+64gb ssd, small, lowpower. I host 2 printer instances , a prometheus and a grafana (with docker). Also if you need you can add HA, nodered, etc., it has a lot of power. My only concern is the shape (I don't really like it), and the numbber of usb ports (but this can be fixed with hubs).
I think at the end of the day as the original poster didn’t know what their requirements were, and assuming not familiar with any particular hardware, Linux or octoprint they therefore require help. So anything other than a Raspberry Pi would probably reduce the level of support. Also one assumes that there is only one printer (again no requirements) so large more power consuming boards may also be over kill.
yes i am running 3 instances of octoprint on an old linux notebook for my 3 printers.
And on the same notebook, I am running octofarm, to handle the 3 instances of Octoprint, and it works wonders.
If there is another arm-based SMC that is more cost effective and people will use it. I will be happy to add another OctoPi image for that device. But only if I can see that it will last long-term.
I ran Octoprint on a cubox-i4 (IMX6) with armbian as the OS it worked fine, all manual install and configuration.
However similar to my raspberry pi 4b the Chiron would not stay connected through a full print. It would loose connection with the hot end and heated bed still on. Switched to Repetier-server and haven't looked back.