Made the jump to OctoPi this weekend with great success thanks to the amazing OctoPi tutorials by @jpod, stock Zim wifi dongle and all! Unfortunately, flaky wifi connections really bug me so I wanted a bit of visual indication as to how the boot process was going. The (not-so-) quick and dirty solution was to tack on an I2C LCD screen.
The LCD shows a few messages during the boot sequence, and settles on the resolved IP address - now I know what to hit in my browser, no matter what happens to the DHCP. Yeah, I hear you, it would be waaaay easier to statically address the printer… but this way has some neat opportunities for the future.
To aid with a graceful shutdown, I stuck a button beside the screen. There’s a nice power connector for the A10 board inside, but it loses juice when the Zim turns off - this means that the rPi will crash when the printer turns off. I wanted to prevent OS corruption and have a graceful shutdown, so adding a button and some code allows the rPi to turn off nicely before the Zim powers down.
Didn’t really know what to call this, so ZimPi it is until something better comes along 
Code:
Album:
I think there’s some ideas floating around out there (@jpod?) about standalone controls for the printer - there’s some good opportunity here for sure. One of the things I’d love to tackle next is throwing the front button board (LEDs and SPST) through the rPi as a middleman so that the rPi can handle more actions and provide some status indicators with a nice light-up front-panel button. Maybe next week.
You guys rock 