If I set up Octoprint on a Pi, do I need a Pi for each printer, or can it run multiple printers? And what are the main benefits of running Octoprint?
Octoprint is only meant to control a single printer at a time. Only way around this I know is to run multiple instances of it. Essentially, best practice is one pi per octoprint IMHO.
@ThantiK yes, but I would advice against trying multiple instances if you are not very familiar with Linux.
OK, thanks. Will read up on the features and see if it is something that I would benefit from having on my machines.
You CAN run multiple instances per RasPi, and some people do, but it’s not for beginners. (I wouldn’t want to try.)
I ran two instances on one pi 2 back in the day. It might’ve been a lighter build than what we have today, but it seemed to work fine.
I wouldn’t try more than one instance on anything less than a Pi3, especially if you’re going to use a camera—a Pi1 can barely handle that in 1 instance.
@SirGeekALot my wife has set up a pi 3 with 3 instances and one camera. She doesn’t use the haproxy for the video though. That gives to much load on the system.
I thought the reason for it being called “octoprint” was that it could run many printers, thus the octo… aka eight aka many.
I know almost nobody does it, but you don’t HAVE to put Octoprint on a RasPi. Desktop machines can run it if you want more horsepower, right? Pretty sure you could run a jillion instances on a Linux server if you really wanted to. Beyond me though.
I think you can run as many as you want, but they have to be on different ports, and your machine has to be powerful enough to run the web service instance for each. I know from past experience that using the time lapse camera bogs down a single instance on a Raspi 1 (but sill worked—just barely). The same instance without the time lapse worked without any hiccups.