First steps with the OrangePi Zeroįirstly, we need an OS running on the Orange Pi.

It seems that high CPU usage is caused by printing time calculations which are done during the first file load to the Octoprint.įinally, OrangePi Zero might be one of the cheapest ( Aliexpress) board which can be used to run Octoprint. Only during gcode load to the OrangePi CPU sits at 100% and it might take several seconds to load the file.

During printing, CPU usually sits at around 5% and RAM – at 25-30% of usage. Also, the OrangePi Zero is smaller and has just enough I/O for this use case: one USB (as only one is needed to connect to the printer), one LAN connector, and some I/O pins for external buttons (will be used to power-off/reboot the system).įurthermore, the Orange Pi Zero has a quad core CPU running at 1GHz and 512MB of RAM which is plenty, if basic WEB interface is going to be used and might not be enough if a WEB Cam streaming (or other RAM and CPU intensive features) will be used for viewing the printing process in real time. I have chosen OctoPrint on an OrangePi instead of a Raspberry Pi (3B version), because I had issues with a power supplies – it is quite hard to get a good PSU suitable for RPi and OrangePi Zero seemed to work a lot better even with cheapest USB Chargers.

Adding restart/shutdown commands in OctoPrint’s menu.

In this case, I have replaced the Raspberry Pi with an OrangePi Zero. Usually, the host is replaced with a Raspberry Pi, connected to LAN or WLAN and running an Octoprint instance. Octoprint is an open-source project which is intended to allow 3D printing without a host (regular PC) connected to the printer. To have the WEB interface, the printer is connected to its own WEB server which has Octoprint running on a small OrangePi Zero Linux computer. I have started modifying my own 3D printer and one of the mods is a WEB interface.

Octoprint on raspberry pi zero w