I work at LogicMonitor - a SaaS infrastructure monitoring platform - and as an employee I have my own online portal to do whatever I please with. I have high aspirations on what to do with it in relation to the space, but one of the simpler things I would love to set up is monitoring for our 3D printers with a dashboard that can be accessible online to check on the machine’s status. A friend at work has already done this in his portal with the OctoPrint API, so any printers we have using that are already halfway there. Here’s an example of what it could look like using my friend’s already built script:
Being able to gather this info would be pretty interesting indeed. Is there any documentation on the architecture of the hackerspace network? A VPN so someone could be on the same network as the 3D printers and thus work on this off-site? On-site hardware to run the service?
Good question, on documentation on the network architecture - I’m not aware of any, but would be pleasantly surprised if there is. I believe since the information is retrieved via REST API, we wouldn’t actually have to have anything setup in network, but I’ve never messed with our 3D printers or OctoPrint, so I’m not entirely sure. I know @rgr said we use OctoPrint on at least some of our 3D printers. I think the first step here would be gaining an understanding of what all is needed for using the API for our printers (here the documentation for OctoPrint API). If I recall what @rgr said when I asked about this previously, we may need to have a computer stay connected to a printer to have this work (not sure if any of our printers like maybe the newest one, have built in WiFi).
Normally the way LogicMonitor works for a standard network of devices is that you install the collector software somewhere locally that is able to communicate with other devices in the network easily (not absolutely required, but makes life a lot easier), then you add devices to be monitored by the collector device with applicable credentials like an SNMP community string (most common cross platform protocol for basic metrics).
If anyone is interested in this, I can set up accounts in my LogicMonitor portal so you can see what it looks like on that end.
What a coincidence, I just tagged Valerie in another post concerning a raspberry pi and the purpose of that would be to run octoprint. The way octoprint would work is you run it on a raspberry pi and then connect it via usb to the pi so that it can control it. Currently the standard install only allows for monitoring of one printer at a time. However, as I mentioned in my other post I can setup the software so that it will be able to be a print server for multiple printer. I know at least 4 as that is the amount of USB ports on a pi and they can either be connected via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. We may be able to use a pi that the space already has but not sure how well it would be able to handle the load to monitor multiple printers as the recommended hardware is a pi 4. I can attempt to assist with this as well.
Haha funny coincidence indeed! I don’t know of any pis we have laying around, but we can absolutely order a pi 4 for this project. Is there anything else you would need for this project? I imagine we probably have USB cables laying around in the electronics lab, but if 3.0 would be helpful and we don’t have those we can order that as well. Feel free to email a list of materials and we’ll get you what you need (board@atxhs.org).
Also, update on some of the info on this thread – we had an IT meeting a few months back and @Jon added a page on our wiki with some general, high-level information about our IS http://wiki.atxhs.org/wiki/Information_Management .
