December 5, 2021

3D Printing - running Octoprint on your phone

Octoprint is something that I should perhaps learn more about. It is software you run on a small linux board like a Raspi and with a usb cable to the printer it provides a web interface and other features for remote control of your printer.

A recent Hackaday article covered some work people did to use a cast off cell phone to run Octoprint.

Apparently Octoprint is coded in Python. The cellphone project recoded it in some new language called Kotlin. The description is "Octo4a is written in Kotlin and uses the Gradle framework."

There are tangled issues I don't understand here involving the Android platform and Python. Apparently Kotlin can live merrily alongside of Java (I wonder if the use of Java explains why Android phones are so slow? Probably.)

At this point my interest could run off in two different directions. One is the whole topic of repurposing old Android phones (never mind Iphones). The other is Octoprint. Frankly if I get interested in Octoprint, I will stick with the mainstream and just use a Raspberry Pi board I have laying around. I suppose a third fork would be taking a peek at Kotlin itself, but frankly at this point in life "just some other new programming language" does not excite me. Kotlin is not available for Fedora (or any other distro) and depends on Java. That is enough to disgust me. But not just that, you have to have 3 different versions of Java installed! Fat chance of that insanity.

I took at look at Golang and found nothing of interest. I am waiting to see if Rust gets more traction. I am quite content to use just C and Python and be done with it.

Never mind Octoprint, use an old phone for ad blocking

The basic idea here is to intercept DNS requests and filter them to eradicate ads. This means that ads will be eliminated for all machines using the DNS server set up to do the filtering. This could mean eliminating ads from aps that run on my phone and TV.

You could do this on an old phone like one fellow says he did in the comments section to one of the cell phone repurposing articles above. I would probably set up my existing linux machine to run the DNS middleman rather than adding a new piece of hardware.

Blocky is written in golang. Pi-hole looks like it is mostly a big shell script.

Somehow these both need to get some table of domains to block or filter. They may get this from the ad-blocker plugin for firefox or some such source. No doubt it needs to be kept up to date, just like spam or virus software (aren't ads much the same as spam or viruses?).

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org