Access your 3D printer from anywhere with Octoprint and Zerotier
In this article I'll walk you through how to set up your (octoprint-compatible) 3d printer such that you can start, stop and monitor your prints from anywhere.
But first, some quick backstory. My wife has recently picked up glass blowing, and she asked me for help making some molds. We had a go using some modelling clay and, well, let's just say it was pretty clear a 3D printer would get us more accurate/usable results. On Cyber Monday the Anycubic Kobra Go printer went on sale for under $200 for a printer & full spool of filament combo and I couldn't resist.
Fast forward a week and the printer is setup in the living room and I'm running back and fourth between my office and the printer with a micro SD card ten times a night. Not that I mind the exercise, but it all felt wildly inefficient.
Enter Octoprint, an open source print server and web interface that's compatible with most consumer grade 3D printers. Octoprint is (generally) run on a Raspberry Pi and connected to a 3D printer with a USB cable. It also features first class support for Raspberry Pi or USB webcams for monitoring prints and recording time-lapse videos. Getting Octoprint running is straightforward and the instructions for getting started with OctoPi (a custom Raspberry Pi Image with Octoprint preinstalled) worked very well for me. If you go with OctoPi be sure to enter the "advanced" custom image menu and setup a SSH username and password, which we'll use later.
So at this point you've got Octoprint running on your home network and you can control your 3D printer from anywhere in the house. Excellent. You then start a 3 hour print and fifteen minutes into the print your partner asks you to run to the grocery store for some eggs. But as the diligent 3D printers we are, we can't let the printer go entirely unattended, what if there's a layer shift? You'd have to stop the print to avoid wasting filament!
There are some very user friendly plugins that let you login to your Octoprint via the cloud. Generally they work well, some are free, some are paid, but they generally don't have 100% feature parity, and of course, they rely on third party servers. Enter ZeroTier. ZeroTier is a networking tool that, in effect, lets you set up what feels like a VPN with extremely minimal effort. As they like to describe, it's "click, click done."
Step one is to setup a zerotier network. This is done by creating an account on zerotier.com. Once there, hit "Create a Network" which, with a single click, will create your virtual network and give you a network ID, something like "225ab4422bc54915fd."
Step two is to setup zerotier on your mobile device, be it a laptop or phone, there are clients for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android and iOS etc.. You won't need to login to zerotier on the device, you'll only need to join a network, which just requires network ID from step one. Once the device has joined the network, you'll go back to zerotier.com and Authorize the device. Here's a tutorial video that walks through this process.
Step three is to setup zerotier on your OctoPi. You'll need ssh access to your OctoPrint server for this step, which if you're using OctoPi was done during image generation.
ssh pi@octopi.local$ curl -s https://install.zerotier.com | sudo bash$ zerotier-cli join NETWORK_ID_FROM_STEP_ONE
Step four - Finally, return to zerotier.com and authorize the raspberry pi to join the network. That's it, your mobile device and pi are connected on what will feel like a LAN, regardless of what network you're connected to! Zerotier.com will show you an internal IP (eg. 172.11.1.2) for your Octoprint server which you can use on your mobile device in a web browser, or any compatible octoprint app, to get full access to the Octoprint server, webcam, gcode streaming and all.
Note: This setup does require an online account with Zerotier, however they require no payment or personal info to setup a network as described here. Traffic between your mobile device and Octoprint will primarily be point-to-point and not routed through any Zerotier servers, however it is possible that the first few packets on the network will be proxied by Zerotier itself. You can learn more about Zerotier here.