Thoughts on The Spaghetti Detective  

Thoughts on The Spaghetti Detective

I've been using The Spaghetti Detective (TSD) for about two months now, so I thought I'd just write up my thoughts on it.

A brief overview of what the software is: TSD is a program that reads your printer's camera feed and, using machine learning, scans for spaghetti. When it sees it, it will pause the print and send you a notification (pushbullet or email).

Their website can be found here, and their github here.

You have the option to run it locally, which is what I prefer, or to use their servers. Note, I'm not comfortable with a camera stream inside my home going off to some company I don't know, so I run the server locally on my home Ubuntu server. For someone familiar with Linux, installation took all of 10 minutes, and I was up and running.

First, the good:

• The software works. Here's an example of a failed print that TSD caught and stopped before it got too bad: https://streamable.com/58rm2
• Video timelapses of every print are stored automatically on the TSD server
• The TSD plugin upgrades your octopi feed to a 720p, 24 FPS webcam (more on this later)
• You can set up alerts for prints finishing as well, so it's nice being alerted when my print is done
• You can tweak the sensitivity of the detection, so false positives can be avoided

So now on to the bad:

• The software requires really good lighting to work. Before I lit up my enclosure like a miniature sun, I'd be getting a few false positives. None since then, though
• If you don't want to run it locally, it's pretty expensive, and I don't think it would be worth it
• If you choose to use their improved 720p/24 FPS stream, it will mess with some things in octopi. They expect you to view the stream on the TSD server, and thus the feed inside of Octopi will be a bit choppy. Additionally, it will interfere with octolapse, and you won't be able to use Octolapse 0.4 RC's enhanced camera controls. Personally, for the second reason alone, I turn off the enhanced streaming

I just thought I'd raise some awareness for this software. Once I got my lighting and settings dialed in, it's been a lifesaver. It's quick at stopping spaghetti, and prevent messes from happening.