Pardon my ignorance.
So will OctoPrint support an encoder?
Spaghetti Detective looks interesting but it's not local.
Kinda loathe web based solutions. They can go away way too easily.
Matt
There are a handful of plugins but I'm not sure if they support a wheel encoder. It's certainly possible and likely fairly easy to write though. But I'd wager you don't have that feature right now so if anything OctoPrint makes it possible.
Same goes for failed print detection. Do you have that now? OctoPrint makes it possible.
True, true... I just need to source and buy one of those to play with it.
My inventiveness and my printing success would be graphed like this.
It's amazing you actually received filament from Makergeeks, at any quality.
The Crap from MG I'm using now was actually free. Placed an order and was jerked around so long I did a charge back on my CC. They ended up finally shipping the order after I did the charge back and told me to keep it. I should have just thrown it in the trash the filament was so bad.
You can actually run your own server it communicates with and keep it local.
most printer boards do support it. I tested on smoothieware and duet2ethernet but I'm sure there's marlin and klippert support too, you just need a free input pin
the "retract too much" so that filament go over the spool and fall over it on the side is the real issue here. The only real solution I found for this is on ultimaker filament box where they actually have motor on the spool holder so they reverse the spool to tighten it. I use 2kg spools and this is almost never an issue, the amount of retraction you would have to do is just too much to be a real threat
the issue I do have is with master spool 
the way master spool "fill" is coiled when you refil the master spool and close it the filament can be stuck between side of the master spool and rest of the filament and it takes a lot of force to release it. BMG does it properly but if your spool is not held forcefully but is for e.g. rolling on those 4 bearing thingy it will ride from the bearings and not uncoil, and when your spool is a meter above the printer on the shelf that's ~2kg of plastic falling one meter on your printer breaking everything in it's path don't ask me how I know
Too bad we don't have an old-school clutch system like they had on the Teletypewriter's drive shaft. You could adjust the back-rotation a little as required. This is my printer right now, some four hours into a print.
You do....
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it's sooooo fiddly. I've given up on being able to print replacement springs for it.
That guy over-engineers things like I do. :laugh:
There's also the gravity style auto rewinder, one with a clutch...
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And of course, now I'm going down the auto-rewind spool holder rabbit hole and came across this one...
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There is one on Thingivers that uses gravity, as the filament is pulled it rolls uphill the when pressure is relieved it rolls back. I seem to remember it was created for Prusa MMU.
Talk about off topic....
My problem with the current batch of PLA would only be made worse by a retracting reel setup.
I already have too much resistance from the wind on the spool.
One of my original questions USB vs SD card.
Is a pi using USB just as bad as a windows machine?
Yeah, the Sisyphus one.
Yeah, sorry for hijacking the thread. Thought the rewinding would actually help your use case.
I assume you mean the serial connection over USB being bad, but you didn't mention that you had issues with this. I've been using OctoPrint to manage my prints for about 8 years now solely using USB and have not had any complaints. The only difference though is I don't print at high speeds, I print for quality, so your "mileage may vary" as they say. The limiting factor on this is actually your printer's controller board and what it's buffer is set to.
There is nothing to be on the fence about with Octoprint.
BEST
DECISION
EVER
Octoprint was actually the very first Raspberry Pi software I tried when I got a Pi 3B+ for Christmas and it was so useful that I have had the Pi for 2 years and I have not run any other software on that Pi. Its dedicated.
Can it detect birdsnest... Well with builtin webcam support you can remotely check on the print visually which is still better than without Octoprint.
I suffered many failed prints with tangled filament, especially with new spools. Then I spent a bunch of time and printed this roller spool holder from Thingiverse and have had ZERO issues since. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2479238
(but when I went back to look for the link I found this one that looks just as good https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:999558 )
I never do anything explicit with the SD card. Just send direct.
There are a lot of great plugins. I use very few but I love them. IPonconnect is one that puts the IP address on the display so in a DHCP environment you can quickly see where Octoprint is. and I just started using SMS Notifier and LOVE it. Usese a FREE Twilio account to send you a text message on completion.
I would not own a 3D printer without Octoprint.
That looks nice!
Thanks all, Received my Pi4 today and was up and running in less than 2 hours.
Biggest problem was setting up my WIFI. Didn't have the "" in the SIDI and pwd.
Very intuitive. Much to learn.
When I was dicking around with the network I also couldn't get an Ethernet cable to work.
Do I need to configure the Ethernet port on a Pi with Octopi?
Thanks again!
The Ethernet cable is plug-and-play. But your own network's configuration is also a part of this. If it sets the default gateway to your wifi adapter then conversations on the eth0 device might be problematic. You can always just plug the Ethernet cable in, having commented-out that paragraph in /boot/octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt as a test. It would likely work in this setup.