Is octoprint what I want?

[JCMartin]

Complete octoprint newbie here
Done a heap of searches and reading and I’m really more confused than when I started.

I have a Prusa Mk3S/MMU2S and a Prusa Mini. I have a dedicated laptop ( Windows 10) in the printer room that Is used exclusively for slicing And outputting Gcodes to SD cards and USB sticks. I also mostly use shaper3D on my iPad And email files to the laptop but also sometimes use tinkerCAD Directly on the laptop.

I’d like some means of remotely watching the print ( on my IPad or IPhone) and maybe some way of turning It off if it errors while printing.

For something nice maybe I would like a way of Doing up a sketch in the iPad and send it off to the printer ( assuming I leave it set up with filament I and turned in etc and do a print while I’m not at home. But that’s maybe just a fantasy.

I’ve read lots of stuff and all the articles seem to imply I’d need a raspberry pi or something that runs in Python. I found one forum where someone asked basically the same question I am but the answers Start off saying yes you can do it then immediately drift off and talk like a raspberry is the only way. Another basically said the user Oils but should ditch the laptop OS and install Linux and then maybe it would work.

So if I want to use what I have ( ok, add a web camera or even better one to each printer ) can I do it?

Also how do I download Octoprint?
The website octoprint.org seems to only want to let me get octopi. Or am I reading it wrong. Every time I search around I get only octopi or dead ends.

Thanks

[fieldOfView]

You can install OctoPrint on the laptop just fine. If you scroll down on the downloads page, you will find a link to this guide:

Setting up OctoPrint on Windows

This guide will help you install Octoprint onto Windows. Do you just want to access your existing OctoPrint instance under Windows? Then there's absolutely no need to follow this guide, this is for installing the OctoPrint server under Windows, which is probably a rather unusual setup. If all you want is to access your existing OctoPrint instance (e.g. running on a Raspberry Pi via the OctoPi image), fire up your browser of choice and direct it to that instance's URL. Don't know wh…

OctoPrint is most often on an "always on" computer. If you install it on a laptop, and close down the laptop, OctoPrint will not be accessible. This is one of the reasons most people just use a Raspberry Pi or similar small board computer that uses only a couple of watts.

[manac]

I just went through this and Octoprint is a great solution. In my case win 10 usb to the printer would glitch. Open a web page and the printer would stop for a second. Using the sd card on the glcd fixed this but introduced sneaker net. A Pi, a $25 Pi camera, and a $8 power supply sounds like It would work well for you. Octoprint also has a bunch of plugins that increase its usefulness.

[towlerg]

Using your existing PC seems rather flexible. Short of power consumption, the other downside is that some plugins wont work on that platform.