Octoprint with a network printer

Can Octoprint be used with a printer that is connected by Ethernet rather than USB?
I have been having trouble with long prints getting stopped (around 3 hours) and I as of yet haven't been able to fix the issue. (I have changed the cable, cut the power cables etc to no avail).

What is your printer make and model? How do you currently control and manage it over Ethernet?

I have a self built prusa type printer controlled by an MKS Sbase 1.3 running the latest release of smoothieware.
Octoprint on a raspberry pi and the printer connected via a USB cable that has the power cut.

Smoothieware has its own built in webserver etc so I could just plug it in and go, but I like having octoprints advanced features and the ability to cut power at the end of a print

@Jay_S According to the Smoothieware devs It's actually recommended to not use Ethernet for printing on Smoothieware. But if you really wanted to you could use socat to create a virtual device that points to the tcp seession.

I've changed some of the settings about ignoring stuff, and connection reattempts etc and I'll give it a go printing a long file on Friday.
Only other thing I can think of doing is to swap the usb cable and put a usb hub in between.
Anyone got any other suggestions?

That’s strange, they specifically state that Pronterface over Ethernet is preferred over USB in their wiki and on github.

Where have they said that they recommend not using Ethernet?

There are warnings about accessing the web interface when using Ethernet, but not actual proscriptions on Ethernet itself, are there?

I am just going through the process of taking the Pi out, running octoprint on my Mac and wiring the printer directly to Ethernet, and I did a bunch of research to ensure it was a viable option.

Ethernet or USB

There are two main ways of communicating with your Smoothieboard : USB and Ethernet.

Ethernet [http://smoothieware.org/network] is very much recommended, since it is much less likely to have disconnection troubles, compared to USB, and though USB disconnections are rare, they happen to a few users. Also, it doesn’t require installing a driver on Windows like USB does.

It does however require that you have the necessary equipment to have a wired network ( typically a router ).

@MikeY

Well that's interesting. I was asking about Ethernet vs USB in the #smoothieware IRC channel a few months ago. One of the developers (wolfmanjm?) said that USB was more reliable in comparison to Ethernet due to some way Ethernet interfaced with the controller. Perhaps things have changed since?

I just found this article.

I'm going to revive this ancient thread - I'm interested in an Octoprint driver that communicates to PrusaLink over LAN. I don't want to use the PrusaLink web interface, but rather use Octoprint to control the (roughly documented) PrusaLink API. I'm willing to work on this. Is this even possible, or is Octoprint really expecting a serial connection to the printer?

The serial communication between host end printer to send printable files is halfway standardized by the Marlin firmware. It's a serial protocol that is used by OctoPrint to send the gcode file line by line to the printer.

I assume modern printers with WiFi/LAN don't support the serial printing, but upload the complete file to print. With that method a lot of features of OctoPrint go down the drain.

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Hi,

after my Raspi dies and i dont' want get a new one of these little beasts, i found a solution:

Now i am testing and it looks really promising.

My Stack:
Octoprint with Socat on Docker
go2rtc on Docker as Camera Stack for my Tapo c100
ESP32 with ESP3D Software connected over RS232 to my Ender 3 with SKR Turbo 1.4 Mainbboard

Hm I would rather recommend a ESP32eth.
Printing just via wifi could lead to failed prints.

Have created a new Fork of Octoprint Docker with socat implemented. You have to build it yourself, if you wanna try it.

Pass ESP3D IP and Port via docker-compose.yml

But keep in Mind, its a test, a very early alpha