Print progress Weather (printer disconnected)

This is a very cheap and easy project and it’s even useful! 😉
Essentially the idea is to have a little standalone device that lets you monitor an ongoing print which means you won’t need to always have a browser window with Octoprint open all the time let alone have your PC on to be able to check both progress as well as hotend & heatbed temps.
I’ll just present the project and hopefully also add a bit of my own input!

Source

The original creator of this project is David Payne and you can find the main page of this project here: OctoPrint 3D Printer Monitor using Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266, where you will essentially find everything you need to replicate it.
I personally found out about it through Chris Riley’s video about it which I highly recommend watching as well!

What you need:

  • Wemos D1 Mini - an ESP8266 development board that I got for around 3.50€ on Banggood.
  • 0.96” I2C OLED Display - I got the white version for a little under 5€ on Banggood as well.
  • 3 jumper wires
  • 3D printed enclosure - STL files available on David Payne’s Thingiverse.
    This means the whole project is not going to exceed 10€ which I think is a fair price.
     

Setup:

The general setup is pretty easy:

  1. Wire up the board and screen
  2. Upload Arduino sketch to D1 Mini
  3. Connect to D1 Mini WiFi access point
  4. Open its web interface and configure WiFi connection to your router
  5. Done, access for more config through internal IP that is even displayed on the OLED, so you don’t need to look it up in your router or something like that!
   

Hints:

  • I tried to fit the D1 Mini into the enclosure with female headers soldered on, which does NOT work. I couldn’t find this info anywhere so I just tried it and ended up wasting quite a lot of time desoldering.. (I hate it!) By the way: I’m not sure if it’s me, but putting the 2 headers took me literally less than a minute, while getting them off was like 20 minutes.
  • For getting the API key for the weather info, you do need to register on ‘OpenWeatherMap’, but you can easily use 10minutemail.com.

Conclusion:

Especially for the small price, I’d really recommend making one of these and as I said before, it’s quite practical. I used to have a browser tab open with Octoprint all the time which took up a part of one of my screens, RAM and of course I don’t have my MacBook with me everywhere I go around the house. At the same time, you can take this print monitor with you in your workshop, out in the garden or in the kitchen, attach it to a powerbank and you can always keep an eye on your print without having to resort to using the Octoprint web interface on your phone which is just too small in my opinion.
I also like that it displays weather and time when the printer is disconnected, so I just leave it on my desk and it always displays useful information!