OctoPrint, OctoPi and the Raspberry Pi 3+

You probably have heard that the Raspberry Pi 3+ was just released and might be wondering what this means for OctoPrint and OctoPi.

I currently have exactly the same amount of information as you and I don’t have one of those new Pis on hand yet. So all I can do is take some educated guesses:

  • Yes, OctoPrint should work just fine (at least I’d be very surprised if it didn’t, since OctoPrint itself runs basically everywhere Python does run).
  • No, the current stable OctoPi 0.14 image probably won’t work with this since it’s very unlikely that it already ships with the necessary new drivers and kernel.

    A new Raspbian Lite image has been released however and Guy told me he’d switch the nightly builds over to that, so the next nightly builds might already work.

    The stable release of OctoPi 0.15 isn’t something that can be done overnight though (neither Guy nor me knew about this before you did). We’ll first need to verify that a current nightly can even boot up as expected, then at least one RC will be pushed out for people to test if everything works fine and once that looks good a stable release will follow. Past experience has shown us that there are usually a couple of bumps in the road regarding drivers and kernel after hardware revisions like that, so please have a bit of patience until those kinks have been ironed out (or found not to be present this time) and the RC process has run through 😉

  • I don’t know yet if the slight increase in processing power will be something you’ll notice with OctoPrint.
  • I don’t know yet if the new dual-band WiFi will perform better than what we have on the RPi3. Apart from supporting 5GHz of course, which certainly is very interesting for people like me living in areas where the 2.4GHz band is pretty much saturated with all those annoying access points from the neighbours 😏

Lot’s of unknowns, some patience required, let’s wait and see.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://octoprint.org/blog/2018/03/14/octoprint-octopi-and-the-rpi3plus/
2 Likes

But what I need to know is if everything I do will be easier, faster, and more fun.
win95-1-1

You'll probably kill me for asking this, but if the old Pi 3 B was 1.2GHz and the new one is 1.4GHz does that mean I can print 16.666666% faster?

I mean... If that's the bottleneck, then, uh... sure?

No. The limit on your printing speed is most likely in your printer, not in how fast OctoPrint can send the next command to your printer.

What it might do is let your Raspberry Pi do more other things while it is controlling your printer.

I received my pi 3b+ 2 days ago and loaded the lastest image available then, I didnt even know it was just released ., everything seems to be working so far .

As a small update on this:

WiFi country isn't set by default, making headless bootstrapping tricky. Workaround has been added to OctoPi and should be in the current nightly, but so far no way to test this.

And another update on this:

Current nightly builds (since 2018-03-15) should at least in theory now support the RPi 3+, if everything works as it should however has yet to be determined.

I'm running Webmin on my RP3, running Octoprint. I watch the CPU utilization when doing various things in the system. For example, when I upload gcode, I watch the CPU spike to around 75% while it's assessing metrics for print-time and cost analysis.

When it's printing, I don't see the CPU spiking more than 12%-15%. So, that leads me to believe that the current model should be MORE than sufficient to carry out your regular printing tasks; along with some other things, if you so chose.

This is also while I have Printoid (Android) running on my phone, connected to Octoprint. AND running the webcam stream in my desktop browser.

It should be good...

@Stano71 - Was that a Pi 3B or a Pi 3B+? the 3B+ was just released on 3/14/18

I don't see this as any benefit to octopi, but it should make my Kodi box happier!

:grin:

My mistake , it is just the ordinary 3B that they sent , FALSE ALARM :grinning:

this morning i have running the octoprint nightly 0.15,and it works now
0.14 will not working for me.
but if i press print knob in octoprint,then the print is blue en still blue,en not the cancel or pause.
sorry my english is not good :stuck_out_tongue:

I was semi-stupid and got the 3 b+ and now the link for nightly builds does not work atm.. http://gnethomelinux.com/OctoPi/nightly/

gives me: ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

Probably due to this

Until the page comes back up, this image at least was reported to work on this OctoPi ticket.

Hello guys, I got an RPI B+ and installed the Nightly Builds "2018-03-23_2018-03-13-octopi-stretch-lite-0.15.0.zip" on that...
But, on the download page I see the new version: 2018-03-26_2018-03-13-octopi-stretch-lite-0.15.0.zip, so the question is, how I get the update from my version 2018-03-23 with the new relese 2018-03-26..???
I need reinstall all things or the sistem is able to update it...?
Thx for your help...

Hi, I have just found Octopi and have tried loading it on to a Pi 3+, however no joy.
After creating an SD card with 0.14 and powering it up it appears to have a problem as the red LED flashes a pattern. I haven't had time to attach a screen yet, but intend to do so tomorrow. If wanted I will supply the screen messages.

David

@Macca45 I suggest you read the article again which clearly states that OctoPi 0.14 won't work with the Pi 3+ :wink:

Yes I had just found that where you said you did not expect it to work. I was merely confirming that it doesn't work.

Ah, ok then. It sounded more like "why isn't it working" - and you wouldn't believe how many people already actually didn't read the article and then opened up support requests, hence my assumption this was the case here as well.

A post was split to a new topic: Installed OctoPi on Astrobox, can't connect to my WiFi