Out of curiosity, did you measure the prusa's load on a kill-a-watt or similar while printing, before you put it on the UPS? I wonder what the load during printing is.
IIRC it's around 120W printing something like PLA. Obviously higher when heating (pretty much maxes out the PSU), and higher steady state when printing other polymers.
It was a measured amount at the outlet with a Kill a Watt style device, so including electronics, stepper motors, and PSU inefficiency. That said, I did it a year ago so I could easily be misremembering. I'm pretty confident it was < 150W printing PLA ~215°C with a 60°C bed.
Can't you just look at the power supply ratings? For example, 20A*12V would be 240W. Assume 80% efficiency, so 300W on the 120V side. Seems reasonable for an UPS designed to power a desktop.
You can if you want an absolute maximum of what the thing can draw as a load, it'll be labeled, but very often the real world use of a thing with an AC to DC power supply is a very different wattage figure from what the power supply is theoretically capable of.
Such as having an ATX midtower size 'gaming' desktop PC with an 850W power supply, that might be measured at 350W at the wall under full CPU+GPU benchmark load.
Right, so if your max rated load is below your UPS's capability, it should work with plenty of margin and you can stop worrying about it. If your max rated load is higher than your UPS's capability, then you can either analyze the actual load more to see if it still works, or just buy a beefier UPS.
There's a dramatic difference between max draw and how much energy it takes to keep everything at a given temperature. Particularly so if heating the bed to a high temperature for ABS or PC or whatever. Looking at the power supply rating you could easily be 2-3 times the average real power consumption, which is a big deal if you're trying to use battery back up.
Yes I agree with you? You need to size your battery supply to meet both peak power and overall energy needs.
Generally when folk express concern about running random equipment on an UPS, they are concerned about peak power rather than energy capacity.
I'll also make the claim that most hobby grade 3D printers come with power supplies that are barely adequately rated for the printer's peak power, so using the supply's rating is probably in the right ballpark.
Edit: ah, I interpreted the thread a bit differently. Ignoring the UPS rating aspect, yeah the average power draw will likely be a fraction of the peak. My guess would be around 100W total for most Prusa style printers printing PLA. The stepper motor draw would be highly dependent on the speed of the print and the shape of the part, since power draw will be highest when accelerating at higher speeds.
For sure, and to me it's definitely worth getting the nicer drivers with efficient idling and interpolated 256-microstepping.
Conceptually though, ignoring any power saving idling features or other fancy algorithms, stepper drivers basically want to drive a constant amount of current through the active phase (which is what you're adjusting with the potentiometer). In order to do so, it needs to overcome the voltage drop of the resistance of the windings, and the induced voltage of any changing magnetic fields. The resistive voltage drop is roughly constant, while the induced voltage is proportional to the speed of the motor. Power is equal to current times voltage. The current is constant, and the voltage increases proportionally with velocity, and so power should go up proportionally with velocity. The motor gets hot regardless of what it's doing because of the constant resistive losses, but the total power goes up the faster the motor is moving.
Motors are a lot more complicated than that in reality, and higher end stepper drivers don't actually drive constant current at all times. Semantically, a stepper driver's promise is to move the motor one step "quickly enough" after each pulse on its step input. A clever stepper driver will only apply current when it's actually needed to produce useful torque. Torque is only needed when the motor/load needs to accelerate to get to its target position. Ignoring the rotational aspect, force equals mass times acceleration, and power equals force times velocity. For a maximally clever stepper driver, power is therefore proportional to the product of acceleration and velocity. The motor only gets hot when accelerating regardless of velocity, while the total power goes up when accelerating at higher velocities.
For a UPS you want to know both the max wattage of the load, as what % of the total output that the UPS's inverter can put out at any given time, and also the nominal steady-state watts so that you can calculate the Watt-hours, which is what will determine runtime on a given battery size.
If you have a UPS with, for example, 4 x 12V 8Ah AGM batteries, it has a certain amount of Wh you can realistically use before you deep-discharge the batteries into severe damage.
Indeed. Depending on the intended use of the UPS though, the energy capacity might not matter all that much. For a 3D printer, it seems like an UPS would be in place to weather the occasional hiccup in utility power. Utility power interruptions seem inherently bimodal. Either it glitches out for a few seconds and comes back, or it's out for hours. Pretty much any UPS will have enough energy to run a 3D printer for a few seconds or minutes, but very few UPSes exist that would run one for hours on end.
Taking that use case to the extreme, maybe someone lives in an area with very unreliable utility power. They might absolutely need to have enough energy stored to run their 3D printer for an entire print. Maybe they solve that with lots of batteries, but in many places with unreliable utility power, it's more likely they're just going to fire up a gas powered generator whenever the power goes out. Once again, the UPS only needs to last long enough for someone to notice and fire up the generator.
Folk certainly might have more exotic use cases. Maybe someone lives completely off-grid and powers their 3D printer off of solar panels, and a generator isn't a sustainable option. They'll definitely be more interested in energy capacity.
The power capacity seems important no matter what, since exceeding it will either result in a voltage brownout, tripping of a protection circuit, or melting something.
I measured this previously on a Kill-a-Watt with a Prusa clona (Monoprice Maker Select v2). Heat-up sequence draws between 120-130W (heating both bed and hotend at the same time). Once at temp for PLA, it only draws around 80-90 average depending how many steppers are moving.
I tried it with the Ender 3 V2 and there is some kind of bandwidth issue that kept it from printing successfully. Exact same gcode worked great from sdcard, failed miserably via octoprint. I’m guessing it has to do with the available ports?
It might have to do with the USB buffer on the Ender. If the buffer is too small (e.g. 4 gcode commands or so) then when the buffer is filled with commands that execute very quickly, its possible for the printer to empty the buffer before new commands come down the pipeline from Octoprint. This causes the printer to stop the printhead sharply, which can cause quality issues on prints, or maybe even print failure if the sudden stop causes the print to detach from the bed.
[You can fix this if you're using Marlin](https://www.reddit.com/r/ender3/comments/btjk22/octoprint_is...), since Marlin allows you to configure the buffer size. Generally more buffer is better, but do be aware that increasing the buffer size will cause the printer to be less responsive to the "stop print" command on octoprint (since the printer will continue executing the commands that have been buffered).
I've been using octoprint on my Ender3v2 from a Raspberry Pi 3B and I've never had such an issue in almost a year.
I use Marlin 2.0.1-bugfix branch for firmware because stock creality lacks some useful GCodes (such as for print pausing) but otherwise I did nothing special.
I have prints fail over serial on my CR-10S Pro (both stock and TM3D firmware). Maybe it’s a Creality design flaw, maybe it’s a Marlin firmware issue.
Also, the micro SD card slot has never worked well. For a while I had to be very gentle when inserting micro SD cards to have them stay in after the click. Now micro SD cards never stay in. I haven’t found any references to this issue with 3D printers online, but from what I can gather it is an issue seen on faulty micro SD card slots in other equipment. My fix has been to buy a micro SD card extender (flexible PCB), duct tape it in place, and pray it doesn’t come loose. It survived a 3 day print so far.
Octoprint is amazing. There are also some very high-quality plug-ins, like Octolapse, which Octoprint's standardized plugin interface makes a breeze to use.
I upgraded my printer's motherboard and didn't even bother to connect the screen and dial, Octoprint is now the printer's GUI, as far as I'm concerned.
I think they handled the python upgrade professionally, the author even went and fixed some of the communities more popular plugins to be python 3 compatible. When the python 3 update didn’t work for me, the rollback scripts worked great and a few months later I just upgraded to python 3.
All in all the main maintainer, which is working full time on it, is communicating well with the community. The iteration cycle has become faster during this last year, and updates seem to be rather stable.
Regarding the performance killing plugins, never had a problem on a RPi 4. What are you using?
OctoPrint only has a single main developer. They also spend a lot of time triaging bugs (https://github.com/OctoPrint/OctoPrint/issues). I'm sure they'd appreciate any help they can get.
Idk what you mean about plugins and performance. Yes, the UI and startup get slower, but print performance? I ran it on an OrangePi Zero (== one of the jankiest SBCs out there) with a bunch of plugins and one webcam without a single OctoPrint-related failure for more than half a year. I ended up switching to something powerful only because of power supply issues (OrangePi are even more voltage-sensitive than RaspPi).
I agree, OctoPrint is very slow to load with the default settings. I disabled these plugins and now it loads very quickly:
- Action Command Notification Support
- Action Command Prompt Support
- Announcements Plugin
- Anonymous Usage Tracking
- Discovery
- Error tracking
- File Check
- Firmware check
- Logging
- Pi Support Plugin
No app is a feature for me. It's a fairly big ask for a free open source project to navigate the Google Play and Apple stores too, I feel app stores have no place in the open source ecosystem. I wouldn't wish that headache on any project trying to provide something for free.
Duet controllers are another good option of OctoPrint doesn't appeal. Having everything integrated into one board makes a lot of things easier, and from a safety perspective it feels a lot more trustworthy than random cloned driver boards.
I have a 3D printer, and I don't get it at all. I have yet to need to print something remotely, and can't think of a scenario in which I would want to.
I guess if you have reason to want process pictures?
My workflow of slicing and printing is totally separated. I do my slicing on my main computer and save the stl to a network drive with organized folders for filament types and dates. Then I can print whenever I want from anywhere through octoprint. That's almost always just on my phone or laptop or main computer, but it's nice being able to access it remotely and I don't need to bother with anything but an rpi in the room with the printer. I think octoprint could be so much better but for how easy it is to setup and configure I'd choose it again today
I like being untethered from my PC or SD card. Drag and drop the gcode into the web UI and click print. My printer sits in the room adjacent to my office so then I can monitor it remotely using phone apps (OctoPrint provides a mjpeg stream).
Edit: plus visualization for auto-bed leveling is amazing trying to fine tune the printer bed.
My first printer was an Anet A8, which lived in the garage due to the noise. I used Octoprint with a webcam to keep an eye on progress, both to abort bad prints and to know when it was done.
I now have a Prusa Mini, which is quiet and small enough to live in a cupboard in my office. It's far more reliable and the print time estimate is so accurate that I don't need Octoprint any more. It also has a USB port instead of SD card, so walking across my office with a USB stick is a viable alternative to sending jobs directly from my desktop browser.
So I guess it depends on your printer - if it's noisy, large, unreliable or you have lots of them, Octoprint is a godsend.
I don't use OctoPrint or similar yet, but it's been on my to-do list since before I got my printer. (Prusa mini.)
It depends what you envisage by 'remotely', I don't imagine ever starting a print while not at home, but I do want to sit at my computer, slice, and send straight to the printer; without faffing about with a USB stick.
two reasons for me; these apply to any remote administration suite for printing and not just octoprint.
1) It isn't pleasant to be near many industrial machines. Chemical vapor/off-gassing can be a real problem, so on top of the usually loud metal-component motion systems/gantries you have loud evacuation/exhaust fans. One place to deal with webcams/remote features on many machines at once is convenient.
2) Real time notifications create less machine downtime. A thermistor failed so a machine stopped mid-print? This time can be salvaged by a notification to browser or mobile for quick repair rather than discovering the issue by returning to the machine at the supposed end-time and being greeted with a non-finished print.
I'm not who you asked, but since i'm preaching about it elsewhere anyway :
input shaping allows one to get rid of mechanical resonances without re-engineering the motion system on a printer. It's pretty unique to klipper -- but it's one of those features that I suspect is brilliant enough to where the other groups who develop such software will probably follow-up with their own variations.
Not sure, I haven't been following Prusa too much lately.
I've spoken to a few people on klipper who are inputing the variables for compensation in directly from an attached accelerometer on the printer frame. That'd be the way i'd want to go rather than taking a pair of calipers to the ringing artifacts on the print itself.
I used OctoPrint on a RPi to drive my 3D printer for years. It was great. I added the RPi camera and could keep an eye on prints remotely, which while leaving home while printing was maybe not a great idea, certainly was convenient.
Yep that's exactly my setup. I don't even leave the house I have the printer in a closet and can peek at it from time to time while watching tv. I added an LED strip I can turn on/off from octoprint as a light for the camera. One thing I really like is just being able to look at the first couple layers just before I hit print so I really know I've got the right file loaded.
There's a plugin that will visualize the entire print in 3D, and can also sync with the print. It's fantastic. I don't remember what it's called now, but if you search for "Gcode visualizer" there can't be that many.
GCode Viewer is included with OctoPrint, it lets you preview the loaded GCode layer by layer before/while printing, and can sync to the print in realtime too.
OctoPrint is one of the reasons I got a 3D printer. I thought the idea of being able to view and control the printer remotely was a great bonus. Now I basically have one Pi running the printer, and another one next to it running a web browser connected to OctoPrint. I really found it to be a great way to monitor what’s happening in a more interactive way. Instead of just watching a few numbers on the side display of the printer, you can get so much more information. Because of this, I think it makes printing more fun.
I just got a resin 3D printer and had to do some digging to find something similar to OctoPrint for a resin printer. I found Mariner [0] which I’m thinking of installing in my Sonic Mini 4K. It’s limited to a few types of resin printers but I was feeling left out from how cool OctoPrint looks.
Hey! I wrote mariner :) There's been people in the community that got the Sonic Mini 4K working.
mariner is obviously not as fancy and sophisticated as OctoPrint, but I'm happy to take pull requests and improve it. Since MSLA printers are quite different from FDM, I found it would be simpler to write mariner than to add support for MSLA printers on OctoPrint.
One of my favorite things about the Prusa 3 series is that you can embed a Raspberry Pi Zero running OctoPrint in it - it fits right inside the power supply enclosure. Bam, you've got a networked Prusa with no external anything.
It is highly discouraged to use a Pi Zero with the current versions of OctoPrint, it just simply doesn't have enough computing power and causes quite a few problems. Prusa really should remove the page in their wiki.
Prusa has a customize build of Octoprint that addresses these problems. As long as you’re not using a webcam with it (and you can’t if it’s embedded anyway), it runs fine, if a bit slow.
I have octoprint on all my printers. Klipper or marlin but always with octoprint on a pi. It is incredibly useful and there are many plugins for what ever you may need. Additionaly I have Printoid om android which talks to octoprint.
OctoPrint is great. I use it with a modified Ender 3 Pro and Cura + Cura's OctoPrint plugin. Having said that, I have been very curious about https://github.com/meteyou/mainsail. I can't quite tell if it'll work with Cura so I can just hit "print" from the slicer and have it go, but the UI is quite slick and free of a lot of random notifications, etc. that come with OctoPrint.
I've got 2 printers - an artillery sidewinder and a big duet driven beast...both have an octoprint. Octolapse is soo much better then anything I've found for the Duet.
This is a pretty old thread at ~12 hours, but there's someone putting in an active effort to enable OctoPrint to run directly off of an Android device. Still pretty early days. The author currently still distributes and gathers feedback through the linked Telegram group.
Well it goes onto a raspberry pi which acts as a web server, that connects to the printer. You then visit the octoprint website interface to manage connected printers. That's handy because I can do it from my phone or computer so long as I am on the wifi, and you can in theory reach it remotely while out of the house if you set up your network to allow that.
Not at all in my anecdotal experience! My Prusa Mini just connected to my old Pi via MicroUSB and it all "just worked" for me. Ended up adding a Pi camera to the setup and installed the OctoLapse plugin to automatically generate timelapse videos of my prints; been very happy with it all so far.
I also found it super easy. The most difficult part for me was finding a data capable MicroUSB cable to connect the Pi to my printer. Most of mine were only for charging. I used an old RPi 3 and used the OctoPrint SD image. After that, everything just worked. It even worked with my USB webcam instead of the default RPi camera.
This was connected to a Creality Ender 3.
It might be more difficult to install as a package as opposed to using a pre-made RPi image, but it should still be pretty straightforward.
For those that like tinkering with 3d printers, check out Klipper. It's an alternative "firmware" that differs in that the kinematic brains run on a raspberry pi and the actual firmware is just a minimal binary that consumes a reduced instruction set. It works with Octoprint, or with Klipper-specific tools via its api server.
Klipper is great. It makes 8-bit control boards about as effective as 32-bit ones. Having a single easy to modify config file is nice too. There's some quirks about it that take a while to wrap your head around, but once you do there's really no going back (at least for me).
(At least as of a couple years ago when i last used it) Octoprint is a lovely, well integrated system that comes close to being easy for newbs and utilitarian users to deploy; while still not impossibly complicated for hacking into whatever adjustments you need. That's a neat trick.
10 Minutes of browsing the website and I have no idea how to set this up with my printer. I'm sure it's great and all, but the info on what printer I need and how to set it up besides installing the software on an RPi should be accessible right from the main page.
Ah, how disappointing. For a brief moment I hoped someone had replaced the boring old three-axis mechanism with one based on eight articulated robot arms using muscular hydrostat principles. Or at least one arm.
Offtopic, but I like the web UI for its cookie use notification. It's fitting to the color scheme, not obtrusive and yet noticeable at the end. It's one of the best I've seen. Good job!
Octoprint was my printer interface until I accidentally destroyed my serial interface. Now I’m using the Ethernet interface. It’s not as nice but I can print still.
I'd say, if you like me don't enjoy the tinkering with calibration here, and adjustment there, then get a Prusa.
They are by no means perfect, and calibrations/adjustments come with the territory, but they have a certain threshold for quality that removes some of the most horrible sources of errors.
Eg, flex in the structure often comes from cheaping out on material or design, and is imo the worst kind of sources of errors. A static error (eg a fixed offset of the bed leveling) is more easy to calibrate/compensate away.
Other big brands may be as good as Prusa, but I have no experience of them. A friend got an Ender 3, bed was warped, replaced the unit, bed warped on that one too. Our Prusa mk3s2 had no such kind of quality errors. YMMV.
Some things I learned:
* do a z-level calibration (finding distance for the first layer) according to guides
* increasing temp (bed and head) by 5degC on first layer increased adhesion
* clean the bed with IPA only, that's well enough if you never touch it.
* never touch the bed with bare hands - I always used tissue paper as a glove
* never needed to use paper glue or hair spray or anything after the above things (but before that I used paper glue which didn't help, and was haaaaaard to remove)
* don't scrape the print off with the metal spatula, it'll scratch the bed surface easily
* when turning on the printer, don't use the small amount of filament that's been sitting in the print head since last time. Back out the filament and cut that off and start with new filament.
If you have a microcenter nearby they sell 3d printers, you can go see them run and take one home. I’m extremely pleased with the Ender 3 V2 from Creality, especially for the price. It makes some fan noise but the steppers are very quiet which is nice. I haven’t had any issues with print quality and overall the build seems solid. If you’re thinking about running OctoPrint check my question in here for what appears to be some good advice.
If you've got the money, I'd suggest Original Prusa, since I got one I've never used my Creality CR-10 again. Even though the CR-10 isn't a bad printer at all, the Prusa provides the overall better experience. :-)
I have a mini+ due for delivery in the next 30 days. Would you mind expounding on what features you’re seeing in Prusa’s sw that are causing you to look beyond OP?
