Remote Web Control and Monitoring

[GeekStreetSolutions]

I just bought a Rostock MAX v2 3D Printer Kit while at Maker Faire. This is my first 3D Printer and wanted to know if it is ok to leave the 3D Printer unattended while it is printing. If there is a problem is there a automatic stopping mechanism to protect the machine from further damage? If there is none, are there any simple ways to interface the Printer to a webcam and control it via a website?

[Captain Starfish]

Many people will kick off a job and walk away. Particularly on the 6 hour to 30 hour print jobs.

but

Yes, there are many things that can go wrong and some of them quite badly. You can lose bed adhesion mid print, have a filament jam and release a couple of layers later or a number of other problems which will have you return at the end of the job to just find a great big pile of plastic string.

Worse, if the thermistor fails (and they do) you can end up with a hot end runaway which can lead to a fire.

No automatic stopping mechanism because these things aren't stuff that's easy to detect.

If you have to leave, you could look at installing a smoke detector on an alarm that cuts power and fires an extinguisher (I know, getting carried away). Or just set it up somewhere that won't burn down if your printer catches aflame. And look at the combination of a Raspberry PI, camera and Octoprint for remote monitoring and control.

[Polygonhell]

A thermistor failure will almost certainly stop the print.
What can cause a fire is if the thermistor starts to creep out of the hotend, so it continues to read what look like valid values and the firmware tries to compensate.
This is made worse by hotends using 40W heater cartridges which are WAY overpowered for the temperatures most print at, and will happily make your hotend glow red hot if you pull the thermistor out.

Having said that I start prints and walk away all the time, and I've never had an issue, I rarely get failures when I print, I usually watch the first layer or so go down, but early on it's not uncommon to get failures.

[Captain Starfish]

Every day's a school day.

The flames thing is a pretty rare occurrence but it does happen often enough that it needs to be dealt with as a possibility.

If this is your first printer you will spend the first 50 hours or more of print time tweaking settings, looking for print quality issues, watching it settle in and generally being mesmerised by the amazing spectacle of things being created in front of your eyes anyway.

[GeekStreetSolutions]

Thanks for the info. I may end up interfacing a raspberry pi to a smoke detector and have a webcam stream video of the machine.

[atoff]

You could set up a RPI with Octoprint and a relay to power on / off the printer. https://github.com/foosel/OctoPrint/wik ... m-your-RPi

If you really want to wire up a smoke detector, I suppose you wouldn't even need to set up the RPI, nor webcam, just wire it to a relay to kill power if its set off.

[bubbasnow]

i currently control 4 power outlets with my octopi, let me know if you need any help setting this up

[RAMTechRob]

I have my printer in one room and my computer in another. I am using Presence People Power on an old iPod, so I can see whats going on without running back and forth. I would like to start figuring out a kill switch for it though.

[GeekStreetSolutions]

A manual remote switch option would be to use the Belkin WeMo Switch. http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F7C027/

[RAMTechRob]

Thanks, the Belkin looks great for this use. The price isn;t bad either.