Introduction.

It is a few week that I'm a happy owner of a Creality Ender3 Printer.

It works fine, I have started to learn how to make the best use of it and I have created some nice objects (in the photo a nice box for RPI 3).

But, as I have said in one my previous article I want to be able to control and manage the print process from my Mac, remotely (well, it could be from my iPad).

Therefore, I have installed on a RPI 3 Octoprint (using the Octopi distribution), I have installed and setup the MQTT plugin and with these addon I have been able to receive MQTT messages from my printer.

Then, I have decided to add a NodeRED dashboard to simplify the administration and control of the printing process.

The github repository

You can find some more details and the JSON code for the NodeRED flow in my github repository

The repository contains also a Wiki, with details about the installation and setup process.

Some pictures

This is a screenshot of a prototype of the dashboard, taken during a run.

 

 

From the dashboard you can verify the Printing Progress (the chart on the top left shows the percentage of completion) , the time needed to complete (PrintTimeLeft) (as it is provided by Octoprint) and the temperature of the Nozzle and bed.

Next steps.

I have already added buttons to start the heating of the nozzle and bed, using the Octoprint REST API.

The idea is to develop this dashboard in order to make it tailored to the way I want to control the 3D printer.

BY the way, it is only a frontend. Behind the scene all the magic is done by Octoprint.