Octoprint - What I learned by upgrading from a Pi Zero W to a Pi 4  

Octoprint - What I learned by upgrading from a Pi Zero W to a Pi 4

I don't know who needs to read this, but here's a couple things I learned this evening with regards to upgrading from a Raspberry Pi Zero W to a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB model).

1. Turn OFF the RPi port in the printer control panel.
   1. I couldn't find mention of this, but if you're upgrading from an integrated Pi Zero W to an external Pi connected via USB, you will need to turn OFF the RPi port in the printer control panel settings. Otherwise, the OctoPrint software will not be able to connect to the printer.
2. As of 2020-12-05, you will need to use the release candidate for 0.18.0.
   1. I'm using the RPi 4 8GB as my OctoPrint server hardware and OctoPrint wouldn't even run using the 0.17.0. You'll know this for certain if the green status light blinks 4-long, 4-short, then repeats after a brief pause. This means incompatible board (as described in the RPi online documentation). The 0.18.0 release candidate worked fine though and I look forward to its release-to-production version.

For what it's worth, the Raspberry Pi Zero W worked fantastic for me as an OctoPrint print server and I absolutely loved how it integrated with the main board; I thought that was very slick. It's definitely limited in terms of capabilities, but as a basic tool to upload and manage jobs it's great. I just have future plans that are definitely going to exceed the little Pi Zero's capabilities.

This post will not age well. 😉