ATXPiHat FAQs Updated 4/28/2018

• In the plugin configuration it says “Only Generation 3 boards are supported”.  I have a v1.00 board. Does Generation 3 refer to the beta versions of the board?

Pi 3, we do not support Pi 1 to 2. Albeit the pins and holes are compatible with the Zero and Zero W, it has not been tested with these variants.

• What is the max current that the board will allow and where are the limitations – components or tracks on the board or ??

It is rated for 19 amps at 12v, this is more than enough for most printers.

• What are the pinouts of the EPO, Fan and RGB connectors.;

For the RGB connector these are actually configurable. On the settings you can change the pins. The pin that is closest to screw connectors is for 12v +, As for the EPO, it depends on the switch, but the switch that I have outlined on my site use the red connectors and the polarity does not matter. Please look at the bottom of; https://baprojectworkshop.com/2018/02/11/atxpihat-released/ for a link to the equipment that was used or recommended. However, anything compatible should work.

• I assume that the RGB LED strip is for 12v;

Yes

• What GPIO pins does the ATXPiHat use?

GPIO 2 - Pin 3
GPIO 3 - Pin 5
GPIO 14 - Pin 8
GPIO 15 - Pin 10
GPIO 17 - Pin 11
GPIO 18 - Pin 12
GPIO 22 - Pin 15
GPIO 23 - Pin 16 
GPIO 24 - Pin 18
GPIO 27 - Pin 13
Pin 2/4 - 5V Power input to run the PI
Pin 1/17 - 3.3v Power output
Pins 6/9/14/20 - GND (Common)

• After installation you are not seeing the plugin. First review the logs and see if you see this error;

“ImportError: No module named pigpio”

Octoprint uses and “virtual” environment for all of its libraries and source. This allows for some flexibility with versioning and whatnot. The .Net framework has been doing this for years, I do not know how long that Linux has been doing it.

First verify if the pigpiod is running.

ps -e | grep pigpiod

This should return something like;

484 ?        00:00:33 pigpiod

If it does not, pigpio is not installed properly or the service is not running. Please review the installation instructions over at Github on installing the pigpio library with the pigpioinstall scripts. There are a lot of ways to do this and to be honest there is only so much that I can help with this.

Regardless, find the pigpio.py file, and copy it to the Octoprint site-packages folder. If you are using the standard Jessie image provided by Gina and the pigpio installer that I provide, then;

cp ~/PIGPIO/pigpio.py ~/oprint/lib/python2.7/site-packages

Then restart Octoprint;

sudo service octoprint stop
sudo service octoprint start

You should be good to go.

The main purpose for using pigpio versus the standard has to do with the ability for it to monitor PWM. To provide the fan RPM, we needed this functionality.

• After I restart the Pi, Octoprint no longer sees the plugin or the ATXPiHat.

3/6/2018 – This is a known issue. Due to the different ways that the Pi and Raspbian can install services, Octoprint is starting before pigpio. I counted at least four different ways to fix this. Never modify the Octoprint startup routines. Just don’t. I have a fix coming in the 1.0.6 version of the plugin that will delay the start of Octoprint to wait for up to a minute on the pigpiod service to start. In the meantime, just restart Octoprint via the command line or the menu drop down. To do it via the command line;

sudo service octoprint stop
sudo service octoprint start

All users of the plugin will get notification of the update when it is available. I will also send out a note to anyone that contacted me about this project.