PotatoPrint: OctoPrint on the AML-S905X-CC

02 December 2022

Purpose and motivation 🔗

Raspberry Pis are still too expensive. Luckily we have the AML-S905X-CC (Le Potato). No prebuilt OctoPrint images exist for it, but we can get everything working smoothly with Armbian.

Materials 🔗

• AML-S905X-CC (Le Potato) – I have the 2GB and it works beautifully
• micro USB power supply
• micro SD card
• linux-compatible USB A wifi adapter (optional) – there’s no onboard wifi
• a keyboard and an HDMI-capable display if you’re not configuring over the network
• USB A to USB whatever-your-printer-accepts cable

Steps 🔗

1. Download and flash a potato Armbian image to the micro SD card. I went with Jammy CLI

2. Insert the micro SD card, connect your peripherals if you don’t plan to configure over ssh, power up and boot

   • If configuring over ssh, authenticate as root using password 1234 for first-time setup, root ssh access is automatically disabled after this

3. Complete the default setup: shell selection, locale selection, user/pass, etc

4. Exit the root session and login as the newly created user – OctoPrint doesn’t support running as root

5. Run the Armbian configuration utility to stand up anything else e.g. wireless networking

   sudo armbian-config

   I strongly recommend enabling avahi (under ‘System’ in the configurator ncurses menu) so you can use http://lepotato.local in a browser

6. Install Python dependencies

   sudo apt update && sudo apt install python3-pip python3-venv python3-dev -y

7. Create and activate an OctoPrint virtual environment

   python3 -m venv octoprint
   source octoprint/bin/activate

8. install OctoPrint:

   pip3 install octoprint

9. create an OctoPrint service to automatically start OctoPrint on boot. At path:

   /etc/systemd/system/octoprint.service

   write contents:

   [Unit]
   Description=octoprint service
   After=network.target
   
   [Service]
   Type=simple
   User=USERNAME
   ExecStart=/home/USERNAME/octoprint/bin/octoprint serve
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=multi-user.target

   replace USERNAME above with the account created during setup

10. Enable the service

    systemctl enable octoprint.service

11. Connect the Potato to your printer and reboot

12. Navigate to your Potato in a browser. 5000 is the default port

13. Happy printing 😎