OctoPrint – My setup & Plugins

Apr 23, 2023

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I selected OctoPrint as my 3D Printer management software. It allows me to easily remotely manage and queue my prints and has a wide range of community addons that expand the functionality

Docker Config

I use docker-compose on my secondary server, where I would like to host OctoPrint. Therefore it was a nice simple process to add the new container to my configuration.

To get going, I added the following to my docker compose YAML file:

  octoprint_reprap:
    restart: unless-stopped
    image: octoprint/octoprint
    ports:
      - 4000:5000
    devices:
     - '/dev:/dev'
  #  - /dev/ttyUSB0:/dev/ttyACM0
    volumes:
     - "octoprint:/octoprint"
     - "/run/udev:/run/udev:ro"
    privileged: true

You can see I originally mounted the printer tty device directly, but I elected to go with mounting the entire device register, to avoid failed container starts whenever the printer was powered down.

After adding that code, my OctoPrint instance was up and running and accessible via the web interface on port 4000

Plugins

The following plugins are what I have in my setup

Cura Thumbnails

Cura Thumbnails is a great plugin to get gcode thumbnails to show in the gcode selector. This helps a lot when selecting gcode form the file list on the server, and the visual indication can really help especially if I have not named the gcode file.

Dashboard

This displays a nice set of information all on one page. I do wish this also had an option to display the camera feeds for print monitoring. Due to the lack of this, I primarily use the control tab whilst watching prints.

MultiCam

A nice little plugin to allow multiple webcam, streams. This is useful as I have a closeup endoscope cam on my extruder, as well as a webcam on the print bed. Having multiple viewing angles of the print really helps with print monitoring.

PreHeat Helper

This awesome plugin allows you to start pre-heating your bed and extruder as soon as you select a file. This is really nice for just streamlining the print process

Print Time Genius

This plugin gives better print time estimates. The stock estimates can be rather shoddy, so I’d recommend getting a plugin like this.

Slicer Thumbnails

Does the same as the other one, i forget which one actually works. Ive got a print going now so cant disable plugins to test. I’ll come back later

Spool Manager Plugin

This plugin is a great little utility that keeps track of spool usage. Gone are the days of guessing if I have enough filament left.