APCUPC

An OctoPrint plugin for Raspbian to communicate with an APC UPC via serial.

Overview

Raspberry Pi 3B: A single-board computer made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation

UPS: (abbreviation of Uninterruptible Power Supply) is a battery-based device for providing clean power to personal computers and their peripheral devices.

apcupsd: The underlying daemon which communicates to the APC-branded UPS.

• An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is a great addition to your 3D printer's setup. It can save your print job during momentary loss of power (brownouts) so that it continues without interruption or loss.
• My favorite brand of UPS products is APC and their Back- and Smart-UPS line include a serial connection and cable suitable for communicating with a host computer like the Raspberry Pi in this case. This plugin relies upon that connectivity.
• During an outage longer than a brownout, the plugin will be notified and proceed to 1) pause the print job, 2) cancel the print job and finally, 3) gracefully shutdown your Raspberry Pi. For this reason, your OctoPrint -> Settings -> GCode Scripts -> After print job is paused should include gcode to move the hotend to be above your part.
• The installation instructions throughout assume that you have a Raspbian-based Raspberry Pi computer which will support APC's daemon for monitoring that serial connection. It is only meant to be compatible with the four-core versions of the Raspberry Pi computer with 1GB of RAM installed.

The rationale for this plugin

Rather than rigging up inline switches, ATX hacks or similar...

...I thought that I would provide this plugin as a simpler alternative for shutting down your printer.

Compatibility

This plugin was created to support only the following platforms:

• Raspberry Pi 3B
• Raspberry Pi 3B+
• Raspberry Pi 2B

It is NOT intended to support the following:

• Raspberry Pi 3A+
• Raspberry Pi Compute Modules
• Raspberry Pi 1B+
• Raspberry Pi 1A+
• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• Raspberry Pi Zero
• PCs, Macs, generic Linux workstations or anything else

Also, this plugin is NOT intended to support those of you who wish to plug more than one printer into your Raspberry Pi 3B.

APC brand

This plugin only supports APC Back-UPS and Smart-UPS devices for which you have the USB-based serial cable.

Primary use case

I expect that this plugin would be useful for anyone who needs to gracefully shutdown power to their Raspberry Pi during a power outage, minimizing the risk of microSD card corruption.

Complications

If other computers are also plugged into your UPS

This plugin can only control the OctoPi-installed Raspberry Pi computer to shut it down in case of power outage. Other computers also plugged into this same UPS would be abruptly powered off.

Setup

Install via the bundled Plugin Manager or manually using this URL:

https://github.com/OutsourcedGuru/OctoPrint-APCUPC/archive/master.zip

For obvious reasons, you need to install APC's USB-based serial cable, connecting one end to a USB Type-A port on your Raspberry Pi and the other end in the pseudo-Ethernet RJ-50 connection. (In some models, this is a USB Type-B connection.)

Configuration

When initially installed, the plugin still needs a script to be run once. The instructions for doing this may be found in the associated Settings page.

Reporting bugs/issues

Please do not report a bug if you find that this doesn't work with a UPS which isn't made by APC.

Please do not report a bug if you need support finding your UPS's serial cable; talk to APC about that.

Please do not report a bug if you are plugging more than one printer into your Raspberry Pi 3B at the same time.

Please do not report a bug if you are using a platform that isn't listed in the Compatibility section above.