Sunday, May 25, 2014

Installing OctoPrint for an original PrintrBot Plus with a TP-Link TL-WN725N Wifi adapter

I'm trying to make my Printrbot Plus accessible over WiFi so that I can move it outdoors when printing, to reduce exposure to dangerous fumes and nanoparticles.

I formatted the SD-card on my MacBook Pro using the SD Formatter program downloaded from here (following instructions here).

I used the 2014-01-07 Wheezy Octopi 0.8.0 image from here.

I then unzipped the OctoPi image and copied it to the SD card using:

sudo dd if=2014-01-07-wheezy-octopi-0.8.0.img of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1m

I connected my Pi to the wired ethernet network and booted it. After boot I could ssh to octopi.local with username pi and password raspberry.

I ran sudo raspi-config on first boot to enlarge the initial partition to fill the card, and set my time zone, and rebooted.

The OctoPi interface is now available at http://octopi.local/

Next step was to set up my TP-Link TL-WN725N Wifi adapter.

I used uname -a to determine my OS version (was 3.10.25+ #622). Using this list, I determined i had to download this file:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/80256631/8188eu-20131219.tar.gz

I downloaded:


wget https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/80256631/8188eu-20131219.tar.gz

unpacked:

tar -xf 8188eu-20131219.tar.gz

installed:
sudo install -p -m 644 8188eu.ko /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
sudo insmod /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/8188eu.ko
sudo depmod -a

Checked that the dongle was installed with iwconfig

Installed my favorit editor 'emacs' (took a while): sudo apt-get install emacs

I edited the wpa_supplicant.conf file to add my WiFi password:

sudo emacs /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

I added:

network={
ssid=""
psk=""
proto=RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP
group=CCMP
auth_alg=OPEN

}

I took down and and up the interface (not sure if it was neccessary), and could see with ifconfig that wlan0 had an IP address on my wifi network. Note that this was not obvious from the iwconfig results.

I have not tried a print yet, but it's looking good.