How do I see remotely how much space is left on the USB drive  

Use the filer on your computer - it's just like checking space on any other drive.

Cheerio,

RE: How do I see remotely how much space is left on the USB drive

Posted by: @diem

Use the filer on your computer - it's just like checking space on any other drive.

Cheerio,

I'm not sure if you're being serious here or not.  The USB must be plugged into the printer for it to continue printing.  I'm pushing files remotely to it through either the device website or through connect.prusa3d.com, as are other people since it's a shared device.  Maybe yours spends a lot of its time plugged into your computer, but so far mine does not.

I see, ambiguous text, I presumed you were telling me where you had searched.  If you are using a Raspberry Pi interface then the advice stands.

The USB is a temporary, transfer buffer, not a space for long term file storage; gcodes are temporary transfer files and are trivial to regenerate from smaller permanent files so if you clear tasks after printing you don't need much space. A 4 - 8 GB drive should hold plenty for a few weeks printing but regulary clear it and it will last  for years.

Cheerio,

RE: How do I see remotely how much space is left on the USB drive

Hey Scott, as far as I can tell there is no way to remotely see how much space there is on the USB and I have the same questions and concerns about this as you.  Given how new everything is I am hoping that Prusa has this on their list of features to include on the next release.

RE: How do I see remotely how much space is left on the USB drive

Thank you for the perspective.  I didn't think the question was ambiguous, "How do I see remotely how much space is left..."  I thought the "remotely" gave it  away. 😀 

I found it interesting that you call the gcode files temporary and trivial.  I hadn't been thinking about the gcode files as temporary (since I only keep the ones that result in a correct print).  I haven't been doing this long, but I did think it was funny that I had to keep around a "project" file, as well as the gcode file, for every print (though I did read that the Prusa slicer appends the project file to the gcode file, but you can't load it into the slicer directly).  So, I guess as long as I have the project file I can regenerated the gcode, but frankly I don't see a problem with keeping the gcode files on the printer USB, it saves a step.  Hopefully in the future they will add support for larger drives.

I did delete a couple and I was surprised to find that the object doesn't disappear from the print history, including the ability to download the gcode (I hadn't realized that that Prusa is storing all of my gcode files on its servers).  However, even though the gcode is there for download, I can't seem to find a way to send it back to the printer without downloading and then re-uploading the file (the "start print" and "add to print queue" are disabled for the deleted gcode file).

I found out that I can tell how much storage is left on Prusa on the "Connect Files" tab (turns out they provide 1GB of storage, a lot less than the USB) and I was disappointed to learn that you have to clean that up manually as well.  Prusa obviously doesn't consider the gcode files temporary, or they wouldn't store them at all (or, at least, they would delete the oldest when they need to make room for newer files).  In fact, I would probably set it to only store them as long as it takes to upload them to the printer.

Learning new stuff every day, thanks again.

Posted by: @diem

I see, ambiguous text, I presumed you were telling me where you had searched.  If you are using a Raspberry Pi interface then the advice stands.

The USB is a temporary, transfer buffer, not a space for long term file storage; gcodes are temporary transfer files and are trivial to regenerate from smaller permanent files so if you clear tasks after printing you don't need much space. A 4 - 8 GB drive should hold plenty for a few weeks printing but regulary clear it and it will last  for years.

Cheerio,

 

RE: How do I see remotely how much space is left on the USB drive

Yes, it seems like an obvious and easy feature to add.  Did  you also see that they store the gcode files on their servers, and the limit there is only 1G (not that I'm using more than a fraction of that).  It might be smart to add the feature of managing gcode files in a more automated way (like deleting the oldest files when they need to make space for newer files, on both the USB and on Prusa's servers).  Given that thought, I wonder if there's a way to get the test files back, I found some people in the forums talking about them coming with the install of the slicer, but that didn't happen for me (I haven't lost them at this point, but it makes me think that I should download them all to my RAID next time I plug the USB into my computer).

While looking for an image for the default USB drive, I found some forum messages that indicate that the only limit to the size of the connected USB is that it must be formatted with FAT ( https://help.prusa3d.com/article/sd-cards-and-usb-drives_112291).   So, I guess I'll just connect a much larger USB and then I'll never have to worry about the storage running out (and I'm probably being a little pedantic to worry about it at all as I'm not even close to using up the 16GB drive it came with). 

I'm used to thinking in terms of GB and TB, since I deal with a lot of video and databases, both of which consume tons of disk space (I have 26TB of RAID storage at the moment), so the concept of not being able to see the limits seemed important.

Posted by: @altruego

Hey Scott, as far as I can tell there is no way to remotely see how much space there is on the USB and I have the same questions and concerns about this as you.  Given how new everything is I am hoping that Prusa has this on their list of features to include on the next release.

RE:

Posted by: @diem

If you are using a Raspberry Pi interface then the advice stands. 

I forgot to ask, I really don't know what this means.  There is a "Raspberry Pi interface" to the printer?  I know what a Pi is, I've done custom projects with them.  And maybe the Prusa printer is based on a single-board computer like the Pi.  I'm still not sure what you would be referring to here, please elaborate. 

I guess I didn't say, but this post is in the Prusa Mark 4 forum (and I am running a Mark 4), so maybe you are talking about using a Pi with an older printer to enable Prusa Connect?

RE:

Posted by: @scott-gartner

Posted by: @diem

If you are using a Raspberry Pi interface then the advice stands. 

I forgot to ask, I really don't know what this means.  There is a "Raspberry Pi interface" to the printer?  I know what a Pi is, I've done custom projects with them.  And maybe the Prusa printer is based on a single-board computer like the Pi.  I'm still not sure what you would be referring to here, please elaborate. 

I guess I didn't say, but this post is in the Prusa Mark 4 forum (and I am running a Mark 4), so maybe you are talking about using a Pi with an older printer to enable Prusa Connect?

I think that I found out what this means.  Apparently lots of people use a program called OctoPrint with their Prusa 3D printers.  This is a program that controls the printer through the USB cable and allows you to remotely add gcode files to a print queue, etc.  This is very similar to what Prusa Connect is doing, but they are using the attached USB drive since you can't reliably directly drive a 3D printer over the Internet.  It looks like most people use a Raspberry Pi to run OctoPrint, so that's why I assume that's what @diem was talking about.

Unfortunately, from what I've read, the Prusa MK4 is not compatible with OctoPrint as it can't be driven directly from the USB.  There are ways to mod the printer to allow this, but you lose some of the advanced features of the printer in the process (at least until those advanced features are added to OctoPrint, I guess).  Either way, I don't plan to do that at this time, so I will continue to use the Prusa Connect website until something better comes along.

Thanks again @diam for the conversation.