As is the norm, here’s a completed photo of the Ender 3 touch screen setup.

The best model I found for the 3.5″ Adafruit touchscreen I’ll be using is by designer Tronnic. It mounts to the lower-left aluminum extrusion on the Ender 3, resulting in a symmetrical addition that looks like it came from the factory.

Download the model from Thingiverse and print the following:

* If you decide to add a fan to your enclosure, I recommend printing the 40mm fan back. Otherwise, print the blank back.

Raspberry Pi 4

If you’re using the Raspberry Pi 4 for OctoPrint, be sure to print this remix as well.

Print settings

For the main holder base/bracket, I recommend printing at least 50% infill. If you’re using Cura, I recommend the “Gyroid” infill pattern. I printed with 15% “Cubic” infill originally, and the weight from the Pi and fan caused slight sagging.

If you like perfect symmetry, I recommend you also print this separate screen surround to border the original Ender 3 screen.

If you haven’t installed OctoPrint yet, use my guide to set up OctoPrint on the Ender 3.

I wrote a separate, full guide on adding an OctoPrint touchscreen to any 3D printer. Use that guide to configure the screen to work with OctoPrint, then return here for Ender 3-specific instructions!

I also made an OctoPrint touchscreen video in case you prefer to learn that way:

Attach your camera ribbon cable to the Raspberry Pi, routing it above the HDMI connector.

The “support” model you printed is used in place of standoffs. Insert it between your screen and the Raspberry Pi and slide the screen onto the Pi’s GPIO header.

Slide the case into the main frame that will connect to the Printer. Orient it so that the “thicker” part of the frame is to the left.

Insert the Pi into the case and ensure there’s a snug fit.

If your touchscreen came with 4 small perforated tabs on the corner, you may need to snap them off with a pair of pliers to make the screen fit in your case—I already did this before taking this photo.

Using this 40mm USB fan is optional but recommended. It’s only $10, so I decided to do it just to ensure I always get the highest quality prints possible. Using the included screws, mount the fan so that it sucks air away from the Pi (blowing out the back). Cover the screws with Kapton tape to prevent shorts.

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40mm USB fan (optional)

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Kapton tape

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Secure the fan or non-fan backplate using the two clamps you printed. If you aren’t using a fan, use the blank backplate instead.

Remove the two screws from the lower left part of your printer and use them to secure the new touchscreen housing.

The old camera mount that most Ender 3 owners use will block the touchscreen. Tronnic was awesome enough to remix that original camera mount into one that won’t block the screen.

Swap the old mount out for the new one.

Reconnect your power and data cables to the Pi. If you’re powering your Pi from your 3D printer, you’ll probably need to solder a longer Micro USB cable to your buck converter or run a micro USB extension cable such as this one.

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MicroUSB extension cable, 20″

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If you printed the optional screen surround for the original screen, mount it around the original Ender 3 using a bit of hot glue or foam tape. This makes things look a bit nicer and adds additional symmetry!

Your Ender 3 now has an awesome touchscreen that you can use to control your printer.

Next, update your Ender 3 firmware. Many Ender 3s shipped with unsafe, outdated firmware that lacks thermal runaway protection; thermal runaway is a leading cause of 3D printer fires. Updating your firmware only takes a few minutes and is an important safety upgrade!

Just as the prophecy prophecized, here’s a final photo of my setup. I chose a touchscreen housing that mounts directly to my printer.

Any touchscreen that will work for the Raspberry Pi will work with OctoPrint, but some are easier to work with than others.

Here are some considerations when choosing a touchscreen:

Size and connectivity

I recommend choosing a small screen that connects directly to your Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header. You don’t need a large screen since the OctoPrint TouchUI plugin we’ll be using is designed for very small screens. Additionally, we’ll still be uploading new prints from our computer; this screen will primarily be used to start and pause prints, control extruder temps, display print status, etc.

I used this 3.5″ screen from Adafruit; if you prefer a larger screen, the official Raspberry Pi 7″ screen would work great too. Some larger displays require a separate HDMI and USB connection which makes configuration and setup more difficult.

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Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen display

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Adafruit 3.5″ PiTFT Plus touchscreen

on Amazon

Cost

The Adafruit touchscreen I used costs $45; this is slightly more than other screens, but the benefit is the quality and ease-of-use Adafruit is known for. You can find cheaper, generic 3.5″ touchscreens in the $30 range on Amazon, but configuring the screen may be more difficult—and many require the use of a stylus.

You’ll need to print a case for your touchscreen. In general, there are a few different types of 3D-printable touchscreen housings:

• Touchscreen housings that mount to the printer
• Freestanding (tabletop) touchscreen mounts
• Housings of either type that also hold your Raspberry Pi (recommended)

Choosing a housing

The exact housing you choose will depend on the size of your touchscreen, the screen manufacturer (in some cases), your printer, and how you want to attach it to your printer. Search Thingiverse for touchscreen models to find one that fits your needs.

My choice for the Ender 3

For my Ender 3, I’m using an excellent model made by designer Tronnic. It mounts directly to the printer for maximum awesomeness and also houses the Raspberry Pi. You can download the Ender 3 touchscreen model on Thingiverse. If you’re using the Raspberry Pi 4 for OctoPrint, be sure to print this remix as well.

Do you have an Ender 3? I also wrote a full guide to adding a touchscreen to the Ender 3 just for you. 🙂

If you’re using the Adafruit 3.5″ PiTFT display and want a freestanding touchscreen mount, I recommend checking out this great design by brothers Pedro and Noe Ruiz, the official Adafruit 3D print crew (who, coincidentally, I went to high school with!)

If you haven’t already, install OctoPrint. OctoPrint allows you to control your 3D printer using an intuitive interface.

If you’re using an existing OctoPrint installation, skip this step.

Before proceeding, I recommend backing up your Raspberry Pi’s SD card—this way if something goes wrong it’s easy to revert without needing to reconfigure everything. Use our Windows or Mac guide to back up your SD card.

If your touchscreen mounts directly to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header (as mine does), you’ll need to connect and configure it.

If your OctoPrint setup uses a camera, attach the camera’s ribbon cable to the Pi before connecting it to the screen.

Then, carefully push the screen onto the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header. Some screens don’t take up the entire Raspberry Pi header; this is okay, it just means they’re compatible with older Raspberry Pi models too.

We’ll use an OctoPrint plugin called TouchUI to make OctoPrint mobile-friendly and responsive, allowing it to display properly on our small screen.

Put your SD card back into your Raspberry Pi and boot it.

Next, open OctoPrint in your browser by navigating to http://octopi.local. If an update message appears, update OctoPrint.

Then, navigate to Settings > Plugin Manager, click Get More, and install the TouchUI plugin.

I recommend updating your Raspberry Pi before continuing.

Open Terminal (Mac) or Command Prompt (Windows) and connect to your Raspberry Pi by running the following command:

ssh pi@octopi 

Then, update your Raspberry Pi using the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade --yes 

When you’re finished, restart your Pi:

sudo reboot 

If your touchscreen connects via GPIO, you’ll need to tell your Raspberry Pi to a) output video to the touchscreen instead of HDMI, and b) use touchscreen input as a mouse.

If your touchscreen came with configuration instructions, use those instructions to get things working. If you’re using the same touchscreen as me—or a similar one—you can use Adafruit’s touchscreen configuration script by following the steps below.

Connect to your Pi once again and run the following commands to launch Adafruit’s setup wizard:

cd ~ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adafruit/Raspberry-Pi-Installer-Scripts/master/adafruit-pitft.sh chmod +x adafruit-pitft.sh sudo ./adafruit-pitft.sh 

Select the appropriate option for your screen. In my case, I selected PiTFT 3.5″ resistive touch (320×480).

For rotation, select 270 degrees (landscape). If you choose 90 degrees (landscape), your screen might be upside down.

When asked “Would you like the console to appear on the PiTFT display?”, select No. When asked “Would you like the HDMI display to mirror to the PiTFT display?”, select Yes.

When you’re finished, accept the reboot prompt to restart your Pi.

Next, we’ll need to configure the Raspberry Pi to launch a browser and load the OctoPrint/OctoPi interface on boot using the TouchUI boot to browser setup scripts.

To do this, run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/BillyBlaze/OctoPrint-TouchUI-autostart.git ~/TouchUI-autostart/ sudo ~/TouchUI-autostart/helpers/install 

Once you’re prompted for autologin, enter your OctoPrint username (not your Raspberry Pi username). When you’re finished, reboot and test out your touchscreen.

Disabling TouchUI screen sleep

This is optional, but if you’d like you can disable the TouchUI screensaver so that the screen won’t sleep.

Fixing touchscreen rotation issues

For some reason, there was a conflict between the screen and touch rotation after setting up TouchUI. In other words, the screen rotation displayed correctly, but tapping the bottom-right of the screen would result in a tap in the top-right of the screen; the screen was rotated 90°. After hours of troubleshooting, it turns out it was a simple fix.

If you have this issue, simply do the following:

Install xinput and get your device name

Run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install xinput FRAMEBUFFER=/dev/fb1 & DISPLAY=:0.0 xinput list 

If you’re using HDMI or the official Raspberry Pi touchscreen, you may need to substitute /dev/fb0 above.

The second command will show a list of device names. In my case, the device name for Virtual core pointer (slave) was stmpe-ts.

Create a TouchUI calibration file

nano ~/TouchUI-autostart/calibration.sh 

Paste one of the following lines into that file, substituting stmpe-ts with your device name, if it’s different. These vary based on how you want to rotate your screen.

su $TOUCHUI_USER -c "xinput set-prop 'stmpe-ts' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' 0 -1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1" # Rotate clockwise 90 degrees su $TOUCHUI_USER -c "xinput set-prop 'stmpe-ts' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 0 1" # Rotate counterclockwise 90 degrees su $TOUCHUI_USER -c "xinput set-prop 'stmpe-ts' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' -1 0 1 0 -1 1 0 0 1" # Rotate 180 degrees 

For my screen and rotation issue, I used the first line above. You can learn more about the values above on the InputCoordinateTransformation Ubuntu Wiki page.

The exact calibration procedure may vary for your touchscreen, but for the Adafruit one I’m using simply run:

sudo TSLIB_FBDEVICE=/dev/fb1 TSLIB_TSDEVICE=/dev/input/touchscreen ts_calibrate 

Then, carefully tap the 5 crosshairs using a plastic tool or stylus.

Now for the fun part! If you’re using the same Ender 3 touchscreen housing as I am, assemble everything using my Ender 3 touchscreen guide.

Otherwise, assemble your housing using the instructions provided by the designer.

After assembling everything, mount the housing to your printer and reroute your wiring. If you’re using your 3D printer to power the Raspberry Pi, you may need to solder a longer USB cable onto your buck converter (or run a micro USB extension cable such as this one).

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MicroUSB extension cable, 20″

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A fan isn’t completely necessary unless you’re using a Raspberry Pi 4 or if you print in a hot location like a garage. I still recommend adding one to ensure you always get the highest quality prints.

I recommend buying a small USB fan such as this one and connecting it to one of the Raspberry Pi’s USB ports. Normally you could power such a fan directly from the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header, but the header is now in use by the touchscreen. Mount the fan so that it sucks air away from the Pi and use a bit of Kapton tape to prevent the fan’s screws from shorting against the Raspberry Pi board.

Things used here

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40mm USB fan (optional)

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Kapton tape

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Now that your screen is up and running, you can mess around with some of its features! At the top, you’ll find the same tabs that you find on the desktop version of OctoPrint.

Behold your latest 3D printer upgrade! With your shiny new touchscreen, you can 3D print all the things.

Next up:

Access your 3D printer from anywhere by setting up The Spaghetti Detective!

Questions? Comments?

I’d love to hear from you! If you run into any issues, post in the comments section below and I’ll do my best to help you out.

What’s it do?

The Octolapse plugin provides a great way to take time lapse footage of your 3D prints. After each layer, it moves the extruder nozzle out of the way and snaps a picture. The final result is a super smooth timelapse video without your nozzle getting in the way!

Octolapse demo

Tips & tricks

The most common issue people have with Octolapse is stringing—when the extruder nozzle leaves a nice filament spaghetti dinner on your plate after moving out of the way for each picture. This thread on reddit outlines some great tips for reducing and preventing Octolapse stringing entirely.

What’s it do?

This HeaterTimeout plugin does exactly what it sounds like. Once a pre-set amount of time has passed, Octoprint will turn off the heat to both your printer bed and nozzle. This is useful for safety reasons and as a last step to prevent thermal runaway.

Tips & tricks

You can choose how often the heaters are checked by adjusting the plugin settings. Open the settings menu using the wrench icon in the upper right section of the navigation bar. Scroll down to HeaterTimeout and select it to customize.

What’s it do?

If you want to print something to show the world and have no time to waste, this is the plugin for you. WebcamStreamer lets you stream your print job in real time!

Tips & tricks

You may have better luck with different streaming platforms. Be sure to experiment and test before your stream goes live. The stream server settings can be easily adjusted in the plugin settings.

What’s it do?

If you’re an IFTTT user, get stoked. The IFTTT OctoPrint plugin lets you trigger custom events and set up crazy creative rules involving your 3D printer. Learn more about how IFTTT works, visit the official IFTTT website here.

Tips & tricks

Some cool ideas to get you started: Trigger notifications when printing jobs are complete Turn lights on and off when print jobs are complete Integrate various webhooks Set special events to initiate print jobs

2/24/2020: Note—OctoPrint Anywhere is being deprecated and replaced by the developer with a new service called The Spaghetti Detective.

What’s it do?

Can’t wait to come home and print? Why wait?! With OctoPrint Anywhere, you can control your printer on the go from any supporting mobile device. Start jobs, stop them, or just check in to see how that 10 hour print is coming along. Setup is easy and totally worth the effort. OctoPrint Anywhere is 100% free for your first printer — then $5/mo for each printer thereafter.

Since your printer connects directly to the OctoPrint Anywhere servers, this is a far more secure option than opening up a direct connection to your network.

Tips & tricks

You can modify the OctoPrint Anywhere settings to reduce video streaming bandwidth usage.

What’s it do?

The Spaghetti Detective is the new replacement for OctoPrint Anywhere. It let’s you check on your prints remotely and even keep an eye out for failed prints. If it detects a failed print (producing what looks like spaghetti made of filament), the printer can be programmed to turn off or pause in response.

Tips & Tricks

Visit our guide on how to set up The Spaghetti detective on your OctoPrint server.

What’s it do?

Octoprint provides a terminal that prints lines of text throughout the 3D printing process. If you want to review the text, it can be a nightmare. Every time a new line is printed, the window scrolls to the very bottom. The Autoscroll plugin gives you a new button to turn that feature OFF—so you can scroll up and stay up!

Tips & tricks

If you don’t see the button after installing, be sure to enable the plugin. You can do this by accessing the main Octoprint settings (wrench icon in the upper right corner) and look for Autoscroll under Plugin Manager.

Image Source: OctoPrint

What’s it do?

A level bed is critical to a solid first layer, and your first layer affects the whole print job! Bed Level Visualizer is a really cool tool that makes leveling the printer bed much easier. The tool probes across the bed to produce a color-coded visual aid for leveling accuracy.

Tips & tricks

This plugin doesn’t work for every printer. I highly suggest researching into the plugin before using it. There’s a useful troubleshooting section on the official Bed Level Visualizer GitHub you can visit for help and support.

What’s it do?

How many times have you sliced a model just to realize you made one teeny mistake? Instead of reslicing the whole thing, GcodeEditor lets you make gcode file modifications instantly. The plugin adds a small pencil icon next to each file loaded for printing.

Tips & tricks

This is perfect for things like adjusting bed temperature or nozzle temperature for each print. Open up the GcodeEditor and tinker with it to see what adjustments you can set. It’s very useful in a pinch!

What’s it do?

If you’re looking to customize, you need the Tab Order plugin. This tool, as you may have guessed, lets you adjust the order of the OctoPrint tabs. It’s ideal for setting up OctoPrint to match your personal workflow (by moving the tabs you never use to the end, for example).

Tips & tricks

The tool also comes with a few icons that can be set on individual tabs. Check out the Font Awesome icon set and see what you can come up with!

What’s it do?

Last up is Themeify, which lets you set OctoPrint themes. You may be wondering why my OctoPrint screenshots look so dark, you can thank Themeify! This plugin lets you make adjustments to the look and feel of OctoPrint, including setting an OctoPrint dark theme.

Tips & tricks

Themeify settings can be manually adjusted under the plugin settings. Access the main OctoPrint settings and look for Themeify on the left under Plugins.

OctoPrint themes

You can select various themes for OctoPrint directly in the Themeify menu item.

If you think I missed a must-have OctoPrint plugin, please post in the comments section below and let me know!

For more great OctoPrint plugins, check out the OctoPrint plugin repository.

The for...in statement iterates over all “non-Symbol, enumerable properties of an object”. So what does this mean? Basically, for...in lets you iterate over an object’s properties, including properties in the prototype chain.

Why exclude symbols?

Symbols are a primitive data type that are always unique. They are typically used as “private” properties to avoid name clashes when inheritance is intended. And because they’re intended for use as “private” properties, for...in will not return them.

What are enumerable properties?

Simply put, enumerable properties are properties that have their enumerable flag set to true, which is the default for most properties. These are properties set either by simple assignment or via a property initializer.

Keep in mind, that for...in also iterates over properties in the prototype chain. See the following example:

const someObj = { someProp: 123 }; let otherObj = Object.create(someObj); otherObj.otherProp = 456; for (let key in otherObj) { console.log(key); } // output otherProp someProp

The for...of statement iterates over “iterable objects”. Think Array or String, although there are many iterable object types. Object, however, is not iterable by default.

As I mentioned in the intro, think of for...of as iterating over the values of an iterable object.

What is an iterable object?

In order for an object to be iterable, it (or an object in the prototype chain) must implement a @@iterator property, which returns an iterator. An iterator object is an object that includes a next method, which returns the next item in a sequence. There are many built-in iterable objects, like Array and String, for example.

The following example shows the usage of for...of:

const primes = [2, 3, 5, 7]; for (let prime of primes) { console.log(prime); } // output 2 3 5 7

With OctoPrint Anywhere, you’ll be able to monitor your printer’s live video feed, control your bed and extruder temperatures, pause and cancel prints, control your stepper motors, and more.

One thing it doesn’t do is allow you to load new prints. This is currently a requested feature and, as the plugin author notes:

I have not considered remote job starting as a feature on the roadmap because I think, more often than not, a user will have to do some work (taking previous print off the plate, leveling the bed, making sure the filament is what you want, etc) on the printer before kicking off the job.

I suppose this makes sense. After all, your print surface isn’t normally prepped while you’re away. Still, I look forward to this feature being added in the future and the existing print control features are still more than worth it.

Of course, be sure to install OctoPrint first before performing this guide.

On your OctoPrint-connected network, turn on your printer and Raspberry Pi (or other OctoPrint-enabled device) and log into the control panel: http://octopi.local/

Click the settings icon in the top-right and then select “Plugin Manager”. Then, click “Get More…”

Type “octoprint anywhere” into the search box and click “Install”. It may take several minutes to download and install.

When it finishes, click the “Restart now” button.

You’ll need to create a free account and register your printer with OctoPrint Anywhere. To do this, click “Register my 3D printer on getanywhere.io“.

After registering and creating your account, you will immediately see your printer feed. IT’S BLACK MAGIC, I SAY!

Rename your printer

Click the triple dots and then “Preferences” and change the printer name from “My First 3D Printer” to whatever you’d like.

Optional: Enable Bandwidth Saving

This option reduces the amount of data that’s sent to your phone while viewing the interface. This option reduces the bandwidth streamed to the device you’re viewing OctoPrint Anywhere from. I recommend turning this on if you’re accessing from a mobile device and have limited bandwidth, but this will reduce streaming quality.

You can now log into OctoPrint Anywhere from your phone by visiting https://www.getanywhere.io/.

The basic interface here allows you to mission-critical the basic OctoPrint controls, including:

• Pause and stop prints
• Checking the live status of your print
• Viewing the webcam video feed
• Monitor and control your bed and nozzle temperatures
• Control your axes/stepper motors
• Check the status of multiple 3D printers from one place

If you run into any issues, post in the comments section below and I’ll do my best to help you out. Or, check out the Issues section of the official OctoPrint Anywhere Github repository.