Hello everyone, I was interested in knowing if people are using any hardware or software to control their desktop 3D printers remotely (i.e. not on a local network and not even on the same wifi network). My company does a lot of 3D printing using several, in-office desktop 3D printers. With the high volume of prints we do, we were thinking of putting together a simple remote control and monitoring system to keep track of our prints even when no one is in the office to improve efficiency. Some promising solutions look like Astroprint, MatterControl, or a Raspberry Pi setup. Astroprint’s product (Astrobox) doesn’t seem to come with a camera, and MatterControl is a little pricey. A Raspberry Pi setup would be fine, but it would be nice to use a plug-and-play product if available. Has anyone tried these products (or any similar product) and are there any issues or limitations I might need to know of? Do you find these device actually useful for increasing productivity? Thank you for your time!
Octoprint.
Take a look at @OctoPrint . It’s an OS for raspberry pi that allows you full control over network and has the potential for camera view. If you go this route please consider supporting the developer as it is freeware.
Octoprint is a useful utility for sending those, monitoring the prints, etc. Octopi is a custom Raspbian Linux distribution for the raspberry pi computer and includes Octoprint. Octoprint could run on other devices as well, but it may be a pain to set up manually. You use a web browser to interface with Octoprint so you will have to have access to the machine running it on your network.
If you remotely run your printers, please either be near enough to take action and something goes wrong or make sure you can call someone to take care of it. It is not recommended to have 3D printers running unattended. In some rare cases, fires can be a result.
+1 for OctoPrint on OctoPi. I found it easy to set up and use. Adding a Raspberry Pi camera or USB camera makes it easy to visually monitor remotely. I used an old Playstation 3 Eye camera (about $6 US on Amazon) as my Octoprint camera, and have OctoPrint save a timelapse of my prints, too.
@NathanielStenzel Have you experienced fire during 3D printing?
It is not easy to connect to a network device in the home remotely. DDNS setting or port forwarding is required. 
@Jinbuhm_Kim
I have not experienced a 3D printing related fire myself, but I have heard of it before. To avoid it, some people prefer the idea of two thermistors in the hotend. That way, if the thermistors have too much of a temperature difference because of one falling out (which does happen), they can have the print automatically stopped and the printer shut down or the hotends and heated bed turned off.
If you do have a raspberry pi hooked up to a router for accessing from the internet, please look up the proper security precautions. You will need to set your password and/or use a key. You should also change the ssh password and perhaps the username. Allowing people into the raspberry pi using the default username and password would be like allowing people to roam free inside of your network and do as they please.
As for how to make the raspberry pi accessible from the web, you might find port forwarding options in your router.
Wow thank you so much for the excellent leads! It seems that people are quite pleased with the Raspberry Pi / Octoprint solution (with optional camera module). It seems like there was not much response concerning the more plug-and-play devices like Astrobox and MatterControl Touch. Just out of curiosity, are there any downsides / limitations to using those other products (besides the price)? Also, did you find port forwarding a particularly painful process? Thanks again for the help!
@Joseph_Choi I could do port forwarding via either my wifi router or my mom’s wifi router. The wifi routers have a browser interface that you often have to plug into the router to access (unless you set it up to allow admin stuff from wifi which a number of people would find insecure). I do not think it would be a painful procedure once you know how to access the admin settings of your router. I have not actually tried to do port forwarding, but it looks like it should be easy.
@NathanielStenzel Two thermistors is a good idea !
@Jinbuhm_Kim
yep, one talked about many times now and so support for it made its way into firmware.