How to Run Multiple 3D Printers with a Single Raspberry Pi

OctoPrint is a handy open source software tool that lets you control your 3D printer remotely. You can install it on a computer like a Raspberry Pi. That computer connects to your 3D printer, and a number of plugins are available to handle all kinds of tasks. You can start prints, monitor their progress on a live webcam feed, and much more. Usually you’ll have one Raspberry Pi with OctoPrint for each printer you’re using, which isn’t a problem when you’ll only have one or two printers. But if you have many 3D printers, Jay Doscher has a tutorial that will walk your through how to control them all from a single Raspberry Pi.

You can purchase a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B — the newest model — for just $35, but the cost quickly increases once you include the power supply, microSD card, enclosure, and whatever other accessories you need. That can make it prohibitively expensive to have one Raspberry Pi for each 3D printer you’re running. Doscher's solution was to use the same Raspberry Pi for all of them. This setup does have some downsides, the most glaring of which is that the Raspberry Pi doesn’t seem to have the power to handle multiple video feeds. But if you don’t require the live webcam feeds, this should work for you.

This solution works by running multiple OctoPrint instances simultaneously on a single Raspberry Pi. Each OctoPrint instance has its own unique local IP address, and those can all be accessed remotely through the Raspberry Pi via Doscher's website. To control a specific printer, the traffic is sent through the website to Doscher's home router, to the Raspberry Pi, and finally to the specific OctoPrint instance. This isn’t a common OctoPrint use case, and it does require quite a bit of configuration to get working — specifically to keep things secure with self-signed SSL certificates. Doscher provides a lot of detail on how he did that, so you should be able to follow along if you have some experience with Linux networking. Once you’re done, you’ll be able to control as many 3D printers as instances of OctoPrint that your Raspberry Pi is capable of running simultaneously.