I am looking at building a linux based astrobox and hooking it up to one of my leapfrog creatr duals.
What board should I build with, I would like to hook up with a network cable and still have wifi. Is there a way to add a gui to the board with a touchscreen? Has anyone ran one of these with the leapfrog creatr?
So I am asking which linux board and of I can use a touchscreen which one? I also need to run a realtime camera with it.
The main recommendation is to simply use a Raspberry Pi.
We are already working on support for Raspberry Pi 3 (which has built in WiFi and Bluetooth) – so that might be an option as well.
As far as a GUI/Touchscreen, perhaps @Noe_Ruiz’s PiTFT project might help.
Live video streaming is also coming soon 
With that said, it is highly recommended that you simply use one of our existing images when creating an AstroBox. We don’t support or recommend compiling and creating AstroBoxes on custom hardware.
I don’t have any experience with the Leapfront Creatr.
Thanks 
Which model of pcduino would be best for astrobox?
I want to do the same…
I have two Creatr Duals that I’m currently controlling with Android tablets (they are RCA 10" with detachable keyboard and USB-OTG, got on sale at Walmart xmas 2015 for $75) and GCodePrintR. Works OK, except the Z feed rate had to be slowed down and dual extruders is tricky – making sure I’m getting the correct extruder heating is strange (kinda like how OctoPrint using the code Tnn, you have to play games with setting your tool selection macro). But I’m also a RPi programmer to some extent (wrote bacteria imaging S/W), and I want to make a RPi standalone controller too for my printers.
I have issues with my 3D printers heating. If you’d like to collaborate on this and other Creatr Dual issues contact me, Scott at Kenatic (spelled with an A).
I have a matter controller that i also use that is 7" android based but it also can do manipulation and more on the tablet its self
Yeah I looked into Matter Hacker controller. But felt the price was too high and it wasn’t clear that it did dual extruders at the time. I remembering that I asked them – they were very helpful. Maybe it does now? Been considering going to a machine controller that does 1/128th steps… might be interesting. The Create seems like good H/W. I got mine from USCutter.com in Redmond WA for DIRT CHEAP. Refurb’ed, but they didn’t work hardly at all. So Leapfrog actually sent me two new machine controllers and other parts for free. Now besides the beds heating up slowly, they work fine.
Adafruit sells SDCard with for RPi with Astroprint on it, seems like it saves setup time if you have many devices to support. I’m thinking of making a custom housing, just for the Creatr that supports the RPi, a 7" HDMI touch display, camera, keyboard/touchpad, mounts on the front of the Creatr but with battery back up so you can tear it off, but powered/charges from the printer otherwise. Of course runs astroprint…
I got both of mine dirt cheap brand new off of amazon, they were way mismarked on price. 1st one failed after 9 hrs of print and it took a month and more frustration then you would like to experience to get a new main controller board. the 2nd one has probably 80-100 hrs of print with no problems. I have modified it with a pair of fans blowing across the bed to help with pla and also use buildtak.
The matter controller works ok but crashes if you have to many polygons. I need to learn how to remove polygons to make some prints work.
The folks at LeapFrog said they had a lot of trouble with some of the machine controllers. I had trouble with PVA clogging up. But might have been due to strange way GCodePrintR handles controlling the heating. Simplify3D seems to be ok.
If I had time I’d redo some of the open source controllers to properly manage multiple hot ends.
I was thinking of going to a different hot end system, remote the extruder (ala MK8, and J-head) and try to turn up print speed. But right now I’m sing the printer to make parts for friends that are shipping medical imaging products. No time.
Now using AstroBox and love it. Control printing from anywhere! But oh man they gotta do something about managing/monitoring dual extruders. This is where the old RS284 CGODE spec falls apart. You have to change tools (e.g. select T0 or T1) just to find out the temperature. Switching tools during an operation is BAD! I do a lot of CNC programming and know GCode well. It would be best if the 3D printing industry established a new GCodes to read temperatures for multiple tools at once.
@Scott1 this is already done. M105 will read all temps in most firmware. Including extruders and bed temperatures.
To change the temp of a extruder one does need to change the active extruder which isn’t feasible during print.
This is one of the reasons we don’t support it yet. Need to figure out proper UI around multiple extruder interaction and other things just keep getting in the way
