Just noting something so that others can recognize this later. If you take a previous version of Raspbian (even like the 0.15.x version of the OctoPi image) and attempt to boot the new Model A+, you will get absolutely no activity light on this whatsoever.
To make matters worse, out-of-the-box it wasn't sending a video format that my monitor was happy with (trying to see what was going on). So it essentially looked like a dead-on-arrival Raspi).
Checked it with the November 2019 version of Raspbian and saw the activity light and it connected. Tried OctoPi 0.16.0 and it is likely happy.
I note that it has connected to the 5GHz side of my Orbi wi-fi router. Strangely enough—and I can say this with certainty—this makes my own experience connecting with it much slower. Logging in was painfully slow. I'll troubleshoot this later but I also note that my own laptop is also on the 5GHz zone and I'm used to connecting to the many 2.4GHz devices and they're faster.
| ssh using IP address | |
|---|---|
| Seconds to password prompt | 25 |
| Seconds to get command prompt | 93 |
Seriously? It's supposed to be four cores @ 1.4GHz. Okay, so it's got half the RAM at 512MB. Just ran htop and it's a bit slammed.
I'll have to look further into this but at the moment (given the RAM situation alone) I think I'd go with a recommendation that this isn't going to cut it for a smooth-running OctoPrint installation.
Update:
Just don't. You can't even get a web interface from this, it's just too bogged down at 512MB RAM. It looks like the mjpg_streamer service hasn't even loaded for what it's worth. It's just taken about five minutes to simply sudo service octoprint stop. Finally, at least I'm seeing whatever haproxy serves up when OctoPrint itself is down.
Update2:
I just edited the /boot/config.txt, setting gpu_mem down to 64. At least now the web interface is responding.
Realistically, this would probably not be a good solution for a local TFT screen (especially with the PIXEL/Desktop) or with a full-blown Kivy interface since GPU memory would need to be bumped back up.
I'm thinking that streaming a webcam might also be problematic, given the memory constraints. But I think I will reverse my earlier stance about it. With limitations, it might make a good OctoPrint installation. With a mere $10 more you could go with a 3B+, to be honest.