Monitoring performance / heat / throttling on rpi 2b

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1

I just switched over to Octopi from running Astroprint on my old Pi 2B for my Ender 3. Previously I ran Astroprint with a usb cam in conjunction with Homebridge and really never saw any issues with performance.

Now that I'm running Octopi (latest stable v) with Astroprint as a plugin I've hesitated before installing homebridge again as I worry about causing performance / thermal issues.

My "ideal" setup would be Octopi + Astroprint with a raspberry pi cam (that's as far as I've gotten now) as well as Homebridge / HOOBS and that I would then add a 7'' touch screen to run one of the Octopi desktop clients (looking specifically at OctoDash - https://github.com/UnchartedBull/OctoDash).
I'm not going to slice anything using the pi, "just" print gcode with the occasional webcam stream and/or time-lapse, but still I'm afraid to run in performance issues.

Does anyone have any tips on how to adequately monitor the setup to check for thermal throttling or cpu max out? Or is it obvious that this is or isn't going to work? I'd rather get alerted to the issue than having deteriorating print quality due to issues in the background.

2

Your /var/log/syslog should indicate undervoltage and throttling as would the octoprint.log file itself. Since it's a Pi the Pi Support plugin would display this on the status bar at the top of the screen.

If you're spending more than an hour on this it's probably worth just investing in a newer Pi, to be honest.

3

Thanks! Didn't know that octoprint shows throttling as well! But as I understand it, it wouldn't alert me of just maxing out the CPU and causing lag because of it? I guess I'll try setting everything up to see what happens

4

Clicking on the notification in the status bar would give you the reason for the throttling event(s).