Octoprint for Print Farm - NO Raspberry Pi  

Octoprint for Print Farm - NO Raspberry Pi

Just to share - 

At our house we are running multiple printers (2 MINI + 1 MKS3+ / MMU2). We have these inside a temperature controlled enclosure, venting to the outside due to use of ABS and Nylon filaments. Having a print server to control the printers without having to directly interact with them has become more and more of a necessity. 

However, the instructions for running Octoprint all involve 1-1 server / printer ratio, and use of a Raspberry Pi. It's been months since I've been able to get a hold of even one Raspberry Pi - let alone three - at anything like reasonable cost. 

Fortunately, we have someone at home who was able to get an old laptop working as a print server for all three printers, with webcam! This was a hairier process than you might think. Tutorials do exist on Hackaday or All3DP describing setting up Octoprint with docker on linux, but all of these fail to address the (rather serious) issue of address reassignment on disconnect.

Basically, if you ever disconnect one or more of the printers, you can't be sure that your Octoprint instance is actually pointing to the printer that you think it is. 

We put together this tutorial on Instructables to describe how to get Octoprint up and running on the laptop, serving multiple printers, fault tolerant to disconnect / reconnect. I hope that it helps you, and saves you some time as you get your print farm up and running!