Ok, these are probably lame questions, but what realistically can I do with the Pi ? Right now, it's just hooked to my printer so I can connect it to my network, but can I do anything else with it while it's connected to the printer ? What can it do if it isn't connected to the printer ? Is it worth getting a screen for it ? If so...recommendations, and what exactly can I do with the screen ? Does the length of the USB cord affect anything printing wise ? (I'm thinking about building an enclosure and will need to relocate the electronics)
Like I said, I know they're lame questions, but right now the Pi is nothing but a "network" to me. Just wondered if I can make other uses out of it.
I moved your post to the #general section since you don't need help with an issue
I'll try to answer some of you questions
Well that depends more or less on if you want one
You can do with it the same stuff you can do via webinterface - like starting a print, see informations about the running job and similar stuff.
Here are two examples OctoDash and OctoScreen
It can but it depends on a few things like for example the cable quality, the baudrate or if there are EMIs nearby.
I use 1M to 1.5M cables with baudrates up to 500.000 at the moment and got no problems.
There are a lot of plugins which might help you with your enclosure plans. You could control your printers power, the enclosures temperature, turn lights on and other cool stuff.
The plugin tag list could help you finding the right plugins for your needs.
If you are using a general purpose computer (laptop, desktop, etc.) costing a few hundred dollars (or more) to connect to your printer, you probably should expect to do more than just monitor your printer. As you do more especially while this general purpose computer is actively printing, you may discover that your prints are suffering from blobs, zits, or other anomalies. This can lead to stopping all other activities when printing so that these flaws in the print are eliminated.
Enter a $35 (more like $50-70 when you include a decent power supply and case) RPi that you connect to your printer. Now it doesn't matter what you do on your general purpose computer, the quality of your prints is consistent. You can monitor you printing from multiple devices, etc.
If you want to do anything else with the RPi, please read the first paragraph again.
IMO, each 3D printer should have a dedicated RPi. Options should be limited to a camera and hardware to control the power and/or the environment. The RPi's physical location is optimized with the printer to minimize cable lengths and eliminate outside interference (both electrical and physical).
OK, so that's one of these depends on what you want to do. I mean if you're expecting your pi to be doing rendering of 3D animations via ray tracing in the background then no. Surfing the web, sure? Of course it also depends which pi you have. A pi4 is a legit desktop computer and has sufficient power and cores to run octoprint and other tasks within reason). Octoprint is not particularly CPU (or GPU for that matter) intensive. If you're on a pi3 you can probably do small tasks in the background but wouldn't go nuts. The biggest slowdown you could encounter on a pi3 would be paging out to swap if you open a big memory hog like Chromium. While the microsd cards are pretty quick, they aren't CPU/RAM quick, and given that the printer isn't going to like not having commands spooled, you don't want the primary thread being paused out for a resource lock.
