Printrbot Talk Forum

Using 0.6 flashed hex(official). I've soldered the headers on, used a few general guides, but no results with a 4bit LCD(super cheapy).

Basically trying to confirm if 0.6 hex support LCD. I'm interested in monitoring with the LCD, not necessarily controlling. Temps, and times to completion essentially.

PrintrBot pretty much gave up on supporting the LCD's. The Printrboard just doesn't have enough storage, i.e. it's half of the normal boards being used today. I designed a custom QT app that I run on my workstations to control/monitor the printer status. OctoPrint is controlling the printer. Interestingly enough I also have the same interface (touchscreen) running on my OctoPrint Pi so I can control it at the machine when necessary, i.e. loading/unloading filament.

In this screenshot you can see the two panes that control/display the printer. Normally I drag the video feed over the control panel until just the status bar of the control panel shows so it doesn't use as much screen space.

Would a viable step be attempting to modify a Marlin firmware down to a suitable size for just displaying print percentage and estimated time?

Other than that, I have been reading a lot about rasberi pi's? Are they essentially using them as computers to control the system?

Yes, a RPi (Running OctoPrint/OctoPi) connects via USB to a printer and presents the user with a web-based GUI. You upload gcode or stl files to the RPi, then tell it to print them.

From poking through the recent github issues turning off arc support might create enough space to make it work. Slic3r had experimental arc support for a while (which worked pretty well for me at the time), but it hasn't worked for years. I don't think Cura ever had it. Don't know about S3D, Craftware, or the kissy slicer but suspect they're arcless also.

I'm a big arc fan, but from what I read some time ago Marlin turned arcs into greater than stepsize straight lines instead of <ducks> doing them properly at the highest possible resolution.

Kirk