After fumbling around and reading articles I came to know that there is a considerable ( 15-20%) time delay in printing from Octoprint than directly from SD card of the printer. Also it seems to be more reliable to run big duration prints over SD card than RPi. Given that the SD card transfer is slow due to transfer via USB serial.
I came up with the idea of a small hardware (sub 7.5$) and software plugin which makes use of RPI GPIO (SDIO(pi 4)/SPI) pins to write the file to the SD card and then transfer control to the printer. I have got the hardware and software portion sorted.
Wanted to know if it would be worth pursuing add on for the community. Please let me know your thoughts.
the product was in pre-order but the target of 50 buyers was never reached.
the product could be expensive, but the cost of manufacturing, shipping, and customs was high, it is the risks of small production.
Thank you for pointing out the old posts. And yes basically same idea, I was wondering what happened to that project and thanks for the clarification @devildant
There is some technical changes through which I am targeting a very small board with in the price range of 7-10$ (if volumes support) and obviously shipping is out my control so another 5-6$ there.
Just wanted to see at the given price point would it be an effective use case.
I started out with a hand-made solution which required a lot of cable and soldering, but which cost a few euros...
however most 3D printer users barely know how to use a soldering iron ^^
from there i enlisted the help of an electronitien to make a pcb, while keeping all of the pi pins unused and accessible.
and it is the manufacturing and assembly part of the pcb, with the search for components at the best price which begins to cost dearly, the assembled pcb cost me between 20 and 30 € each. to this we must add the shipping costs which add some euro, to this we add the customs costs, and finally what the state takes on the product sold (in France 20%) in the end the sale of a product to us brought in € 10 for two.
and to that we have to count the development of the plugin and its maintenance and help to the user
and the main issues I encountered with the community were:
a large part did not understand the point or operation of the module
and people found the product too expensive, which is quite frustrating because in the end it takes a lot of work, and the gain was minimal
in the end the positive point is that I have my functional module that I still use today
Thank you very much for your inputs. Probably I am bit late to meet you. But great effort the documentation, the troubleshooting guide. Lot of work has gone into it from your end.
We have a lot of experience in embedded and electronics side of things. The design concept we are working on uses few of the pins of the RPi but would be very small and low cost.
I completely agree on the first point. Even I was not aware of the extra time it took while printing through octoprint. It might require some articles and voice of influencers. I have already conceptualized run tests to prove the concept so I might make it through fully I guess.
