After Marlin and Cura butting heads over linear advance (today it decided to retract the filament all the way out of the extruder). I’ve completely re-installed my toolchain, Marlin 1.1.9 with linear advance turned off for now, 1.41 Slic3r PE, and good old pronterface. Sadly I’ve given up OctoPrint for now as the startup time on my raspberry pi seems to be about 10 minutes and I’ve had a couple of failed prints with communication errors.
Finally seem to be getting prints out of it reliably.
I’ve always felt OctoPrint was sooooooo bloated for what it did. On a Raspberry Pi B original, that web interface should have FLOWN. It was designed very well, and allows for the ultimate extensibility though. So it’s a tradeoff worth making sometimes.
The ‘bloated’ feeling may not actually be OctoPrint itself though. It could be anything from the libraries that Gina is using, or it could be the javascript engine in the browser. I dunno.
Python isn’t the fastest language. It took me a lot of work to optimize it for a long running algorithm.
What it’s good at is multiplatform.
I used a cheap intel NUC and it works great.
It all depends on optimizations. I had a recursive loop doing some math operations on a pandas dataframe. Without optimizations it took 9 minutes. With it took 10 seconds. And those optimizations were done by basically using unsafe nonstandard functions and parallel processing (which is clunky in python). This was on an i7 with 64gb of memory, I couldn’t imagine how slow it would be on a pi.
Not to mention the sd card on the pi is a slow limiting factor.