Ao> I saw a youtube video about a 3D printer. Ao> Ao> The video stated it was using an addon Pi to run the 3D printer. Ao> Ao> Why the addon ? What is the Pi doing ? Ao> Ao> Details please.
I would assume that the Pi is literally controlling the printer's motors, based on the data being sent to it, in order to print whatever it is that is being printed. But that may not be accurate, without seeing it for myself. Could you provide a link to this video?
Cheers!
McDoob SysOp, PiBBS pibbs.sytes.net
I saw a youtube video about a 3D printer.
The video stated it was using an addon Pi to run the 3D printer.
Why the addon ? What is the Pi doing ?
Details please.
Thank you !
Octoprint
Almost certainly octoprint, it provides a web interface to the printer controls & streams the gcode to the printer. it eliminates the need to transfer files via an sd card (lots of other features as well but that is the main one)
Could be:
The Pi still needs to connect to stepper motor driver boards even when controlling the motors directly, because its GPIO outputs aren't nearly powerful enough to power the motors themselves.
It's more likely that it's streaming gcode to the printer, and maybe running a camera, with something like OctoPrint. Motion control in a 3D printer is a real-time task for which the Raspberry Pi is ill-suited. You'll almost always find another board somewhere on the printer that controls the motors and heaters; it could have anything from some of the slower speed grades of ARM-compatible microcontrollers (topping out under 200 MHz) on down to 8-bit AVRs at 16 MHz.
(There is a board, the SKR Pico, that uses Raspberry Pi's RP2040 microcontroller to run a 3D printer, but I suspect that's not what the OP saw.)
Well a microcontroller running Linux would be ill-suited also. It's just that people allways expect a Pi to be running Linux and a microntroller to be running no OS at all. While the Linux options for microcontrollers aren't always that great, there are a multitude a bare-metal environments available for the Pi.
Besides that, the PrintPi project uses the DMA hardware of the Pi to achieve the required timing precision even when running Linux.
The GPU is also able to be programmed, thereby operating as a separate processor within the Pi itself, able to run real-time software like a microntroller (and be reprogrammed at run-time).
The only trouble with these latter options is that there is little official documentation, and even less example code. Unless you have access to the proprietary Broadcom SDKs perhaps. So that makes it hard for open-source developers designing these things, who generally choose to use a separate microcontroller instead.
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