There are 3 different ways to connect Octoprint to Smoothie:
Octoprint can’t connect via network natively, so we’ll use socat (a fork of famous netcat) to create a local pipe to route traffic to Smoothie.
First install it (all the following examples are for OctoPi):
sudo apt-get install socat
Now try this command (replace SMOOTHIE_IP with your Smoothieboard address, like 192.168.0.10):
sudo socat pty,wait-slave,link=/dev/ttySmoothie,perm=0660,group=tty tcp:SMOOTHIE_IP:23
You’ll see no output (that’s ok). Leave the command running. We’ll finalize that later.
Proceed to Octoprint Web UI.
Go to OctoPrint Settings → Serial Connection:
Set Additional serial ports to /dev/ttySmoothie.
Save, then reopen the same settings page.
Set Serial Port to /dev/ttySmoothie.
Set Baudrate to maximum: 250000.
Save and close.
Now try to connect to the printer. If it connects, we should finalize the configuration and add socat to system startup.
Open /etc/rc.local:
sudo nano /etc/rc.local
Go down with the ↓ key until you reach the end of the file. The last line is usually exit 0. Before this line add the following (replace SMOOTHIE_IP with Smoothie IP address):
socat pty,wait-slave,link=/dev/ttySmoothie,perm=0660,group=tty tcp:SMOOTHIE_IP:23 &
Save & exit: Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X.
Reboot and check if it works.
Try to print (stream) some file from Octoprint (not from Smoothie’s SD card). You may notice that it streams gcode awkwardly slow even on a fast network connection. That’s how it happens for some of the users. That means you should prefer USB to Ethernet connection.
It might be working for you. Please leave a note somewhere if the speed is fine via socat.
Still, you can upload to SD (slow too: 1 MB/min for some users) and use Octoprint to start/stop jobs and control printer status.
Described on Octoprint wiki at Setup OctoPrint with Smoothie.
Set the “Ignore any unhandled errors from the firmware” setting in Octoprint.
TODO: add some more documentation here.