Since the beginning of my 3D printer custom build adventure, I was searching for a fast, good looking and inexpensive interface to add to my printer design. Everything was so slow and seemed old and obsolete out of the box, nothing really satisfied my needs until I discovered OctoApp!
As I was already working with OctoPrint to control my printer and manage things around it, the switch was natural and easy. I finally found the answer for the perfect low-cost and fast display!
The only downside (as I’m daydreaming a lot), I always loose my personal cellphone around my house, which makes it pretty impractical when I’m in front of the printer and have no access to OctoApp. That’s when I realized that a lot of people have an old cellphone laying around and those could make some pretty low cost display, with the highest quality possible.
I then designed a custom case for a Samsung Galaxy A8 and made it my permanent printer display, adding by the same time some incredible features that transformed my printer into an actual production machine and an awesome remote control interface when combined with OctoEverywhere.
Let’s do a quick overview of some supported features that are now a must for my printings:
Main screen progress
With one quick look, you know exactly what’s going on with your actual process.
Spool Manager
The Spool Manager plugin is quite powerful when combined to OctoApp, you can manage what spool you currently use and the plugin usage calculation is quite accurate. If you enter correctly what spool is installed each time, you’ll have a great tracking of your filament inventory!
GPIO Control
With GPIO control, you can activate outputs of your Raspberry Pi. Easily manage fans, lights and more to automate the environment around the printer.
Live tuning and baby stepping
This integrated feature allows live tuning while printing. You can adjust the print speed, flow, fan speed and the Z offset without disturbing the print.
Cancel object in multiple prints
When printing multiples objects at once and one of them fails after a couple of hours, it’s quite frustrating to waste all those good parts. With this plugin, you can easily cancel the failing part so the good ones keeps running.
Webcam support with AI failure detection
This plugin from OctoEverywhere is really one of the most powerful, yet easy to configure. If you’re tired of crashing your printer or wasting some filament due to failed prints, this plugin is for you! With the smart AI failure detection and automatic pause of the machine, Gadget is going to be your new best friend!
Terminal command
You can send direct G-code commands to control your printer, PID tune, calibrate your steps/mm and much more. See this post to know more about G-code commands.
File manager
The file manager combined with the Slicer Thumbnail plugin makes a quite nice looking and well-organized preview of the print you want to make. Works also with Ideamaker slicer thumbnails.
Push Notifications
You can customize the push notifications to track down the current state of the print, or know specific events, like when the print or the first layer is done.
Bed level visualizer
This plugin is quite useful when you want to validate your leveling and see the result.
Dark theme mode
OctoApp offers a dark and light theme mode.
Because I use the app as a permanent display, I prefer to use the dark mode to limit battery usage a preserve the phone as long as possible.
Regular updates
One of the funny part of this app, the developer is actually having some complaints about too much updates. In my opinion, that’s one of the nicest problem a developer can have and shows how healthy the app is.
You can follow the live updates on this Gitlab feed so you won’t miss any new features
Other plugin and cool features
You can push your printer way further with all those other plugins that are currently integrated with OctoApp. The developer behind this app is incredibly dedicated and really does release some useful and well developed tools to help the growing printing community.
This is the list of all the other plugins supported at the moment:
- GcodeViewer
- Ngrok
- Obico
- PsuControl
- Octolapse
- MultiCam
- UploadAnything
- Mmu2FilamentSelect
- Prusa Mmu
- BetterGrblSupport
- FilamentManager
- Tasmota
- TpLinkSmartPlug
- IkeaTradfri
- Ws281xLedStatus
- MyStromSwitch
- OctoRelay
- OctoLight
- OctoLightHA
- WemoSwitch
- UsbRelayControl
- Ophom
- OctoHue
- UltimakerFormatPackage
- PrintTimeGenius
- ArcWelder
- OctoCam
- Wled Enclosure
- Tuya
And finally, on top of all that, OctoApp supports Android widgets, Wear OS, IOS and much more to come!
Happy printing
Jerome
