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It's a full linux system with a lot of IO and easy to embed in other devices. Since this thread is comparing arduino and Raspberry Pi I think most commenters ar

It's a full linux system with a lot of IO and easy to embed in other devices. Since this thread is comparing arduino and Raspberry Pi I think most commenters are thinking about embedded/hardware controlling applications. Plus it has multiple form factors useful for prototyping and final product. And it's just the de facto standard for these applications. There are competing products with varying degrees of compatibility but with Raspberry Pi if you want to add a camera, sensor, motor driver etc you can always find a pre-made hardware interface and the code to make it work, at least at the prototype stage. For a webserver an small x86 system is a good choice but it doesn't work as the brains of an IoT device or 3D printer.

steve_adams_86 4y ago
Is a raspberry pi suitable as the brains of a 3d printer? You could operate the printer with far less than that. I suppose if you want a camera you could power a pi and a camera from the printer’s power supply, and it could be useful for receiving jobs to send to the printer, but it strikes me as the wrong tool for actually performing print jobs. I’m prepared to be corrected, though. Maybe I’ve just used really dumb printers and I’m not familiar with the world of pi-based 3d printers.
- jtode 4y ago
  As it happens I just got my very basic printer working after breaking it a year ago (fixed it in an afternoon, spent a year reaching that afternoon), and I've been learning all about this. Fast answer: yes, you can use a Pi, most often running OctoPi, but only a Pi3 at least is fast enough - with a 2 or some Zero models, it will be unable to keep up with faster prints and possibly wreck em. There's a newer, better firmware which I'm about to install on my printer called Klipper, which replaces the more typical Marlin that you find on most entry-level printers, and it depends on a Pi running alongside the printer's microcontroller. For that, it apparently is a huge boost in both speed and quality, so I'm checking it out.
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    Nice, thanks. I should dig into this stuff one day. I’ve only got a Zero W handy so I can’t try octoprint, but maybe when it’s possible to buy a pi again I’ll try this stuff out. It’s so cool that tiny little microcontrollers can handle prints without much trouble (though you can get stuttering if they can’t hold enough instructions at once), but while a Pi, despite being far more powerful, can become unreliable and ruin prints. Given that’s likely because it’s talking over a network, handling a camera feed, running an operating system, etc. I just find it so cool how useful and capable microcontrollers can be in the right settings.
    - johnwalkr 4y ago
      Not just that it's doing more. A small microcontroller will run in realtime with completely repeatable and testable operation, whereas a pi running linux cannot run a program like this. Even though I claim pi is the de facto standard for getting started, a microcontroller controlling the stepper motors is a technically improved solution. You will probably be interested to check out the beaglebone series of boards. They are less of a de facto standard but they are popular enough. Their CPUs have two 200Mhz 32bit microcontroller cores running in realtime. They can directly share the same memory as the ARM cores so you can have the best of both worlds on one computer.
      - steve_adams_86 4y ago
        I've been interested in the Beaglebones. They seem much better suited to the types of things I build, and while they aren't super affordable, they're much cheaper than a Pi right now. Do you know of any obvious drawbacks with beagles? I can imagine the community is smaller, so there would be fewer peripherals and libraries to choose from. Generally speaking I don't really need that, though. Sometimes off-the-shelf solutions are even unappealing because I enjoy learning, or I don't want to hit edge-cases where it doesn't quite fit my use case.
        johnwalkr 4y ago

steve_adams_86 4y ago

Is a raspberry pi suitable as the brains of a 3d printer? You could operate the printer with far less than that. I suppose if you want a camera you could power a pi and a camera from the printer’s power supply, and it could be useful for receiving jobs to send to the printer, but it strikes me as the wrong tool for actually performing print jobs. I’m prepared to be corrected, though. Maybe I’ve just used really dumb printers and I’m not familiar with the world of pi-based 3d printers.

jtode 4y ago
As it happens I just got my very basic printer working after breaking it a year ago (fixed it in an afternoon, spent a year reaching that afternoon), and I've been learning all about this. Fast answer: yes, you can use a Pi, most often running OctoPi, but only a Pi3 at least is fast enough - with a 2 or some Zero models, it will be unable to keep up with faster prints and possibly wreck em. There's a newer, better firmware which I'm about to install on my printer called Klipper, which replaces the more typical Marlin that you find on most entry-level printers, and it depends on a Pi running alongside the printer's microcontroller. For that, it apparently is a huge boost in both speed and quality, so I'm checking it out.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  Nice, thanks. I should dig into this stuff one day. I’ve only got a Zero W handy so I can’t try octoprint, but maybe when it’s possible to buy a pi again I’ll try this stuff out. It’s so cool that tiny little microcontrollers can handle prints without much trouble (though you can get stuttering if they can’t hold enough instructions at once), but while a Pi, despite being far more powerful, can become unreliable and ruin prints. Given that’s likely because it’s talking over a network, handling a camera feed, running an operating system, etc. I just find it so cool how useful and capable microcontrollers can be in the right settings.
  - johnwalkr 4y ago
    Not just that it's doing more. A small microcontroller will run in realtime with completely repeatable and testable operation, whereas a pi running linux cannot run a program like this. Even though I claim pi is the de facto standard for getting started, a microcontroller controlling the stepper motors is a technically improved solution. You will probably be interested to check out the beaglebone series of boards. They are less of a de facto standard but they are popular enough. Their CPUs have two 200Mhz 32bit microcontroller cores running in realtime. They can directly share the same memory as the ARM cores so you can have the best of both worlds on one computer.
    - steve_adams_86 4y ago
      I've been interested in the Beaglebones. They seem much better suited to the types of things I build, and while they aren't super affordable, they're much cheaper than a Pi right now. Do you know of any obvious drawbacks with beagles? I can imagine the community is smaller, so there would be fewer peripherals and libraries to choose from. Generally speaking I don't really need that, though. Sometimes off-the-shelf solutions are even unappealing because I enjoy learning, or I don't want to hit edge-cases where it doesn't quite fit my use case.
      - johnwalkr 4y ago