I purchased a Pi4 8gb from the good folks at Core this week to run Octoprint on my Kywoo Max 3d printer via WiFi. I imaged the SD card with Octoprint 18 from the Octoprint.org, opened the file octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt (with Notepad++) and updated my SSID and password. I also changed the US code to AU and updated the name to Australia.
I put the Pi into the Arlo case that I purchased at the same time and connected the Raspberry power supply (also purchased at the same time) but I couldn’t get it to power up. After a couple of phone calls and emails it was found (to my embarrassment) that I wasn’t pressing the power button correctly - a short press, not a long one! That now sorted I inserted the SD card, powered up but it wouldn’t show up on my router. I removed the Pi from the case and tried again…success, and I happily printed that evening. This morning I couldn’t get the Pi to connect to the WiFi again. Did all the usual things…powered down, restarted etc all to no avail. I put it in the case, out of it, nothing made a difference. I could see on my router a ‘shadow’ of where the pi had connected last night but when I restarted the router that disappeared. So I started from scratch and reimaged the SD card, still no joy. I went to the local Officeworks and bought a fresh card in case there was a problem. Repeated all the steps…nothing.
I have an older Pi3 and I inserted the card from the Pi4, it wouldn’t connect. I reimaged another fresh card for it and tried again, nothing.
I’m not sure what to try next. Any help is appreciated. Please note: I’m a novice at all this and my learning curve is sharper than Everest…so it’s possible that I’ve made a rookie error here somewhere.
EDIT: I should have mentioned that I tried connecting the Pi to my router directly by ethernet wire. No change unfortunately.
Hi Bill,
Welcome to the forum!
Let’s see what we can do to fix this. First, which power supply are you using with the Pi? It’s unlikely that this is causing the issue, but it’s a quick check to make sure that the Pi is running correctly.
Also, as another quick check is to ensure that the file was edited correctly would be to remove the versions that is currently on the SD card, and replace it with this under the same name in the same directory (edited with your SSID and Password as per the instructions) also running ifconfig from a command line and checking that the wlan0 interface exists wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Also if all else fails, I’d suggest connecting to ethernet just to ensure that there’s no other issues than network connectivity that are occurring. I’ve attached a troubleshooting guide for you below that should run you through some tests to be able to identify what’s causing your problem.
Hi Bryce, thanks for the reply. I bought a Raspberry power supply with the Pi4. A constant red light shows up on the board and an intermittent green one as well. Also, I have connected using an ethernet cable…no change.
I will try again with fresh files, although I have done this about 5 times now.
The ifconfig suggestion is new to me…bear with me while I figure out how to do that.
Hey Bill,
How have you currently got the Pi setup, do you have a photo? If you’ve got access to a monitor and a keyboard for the Pi Octoprint should boot into a command-line interface called a bash terminal that will let you run that command. Then it will spit back all of the relevant details about your interfaces which will likely be wlan0 and eth0.
By the sounds of it the Pi is working correctly, so I suspect that there’s some issue with the setup, which tutorial did you run through when initially putting this together? This should give us a better idea of the steps you’ve taken to get to that point.
I used the same tutorial you linked further up (WiFi setup and troubleshooting - FAQ - OctoPrint Community Forum). I’m working on getting some photos.
Here’s a picture of my set up…fairly straightforward. That’s my Pi3 in the left of the pic. I’ve also included a screenshot of my router featuring a Pi entry, but no IP.
Hey Bill,
Just obscured the MAC addresses for the devices for you, probably best not to have that displayed publicly 
It doesn’t really matter, although just good practice to anonymize any unique details about your devices.
If you connect a monitor to your Pi via the micro HDMI can you ensure that Octoprint is booting correctly? Also, by which method are you trying to connect to your Pi from a local machine?
Thanks for obscuring the MAC addresses…I don’t know what I’m doing half the time and the other half I’m confused!
I don’t have a spare monitor…trying to borrow one off a mate.
Local machine?? I think you’re talking about my 3D printer?? If so then by USB…sorry, I just realised I didn’t show it in the pix.
The two chords you see on the old Pi are them…the white goes to the printer, and the black to a web cam to monitor the prints remotely (although I haven’t been able to set up remote viewing yet).
Hi Bill,
Sorry about the mix in terminology, local machine usually refers to your computer, it shouldn’t matter whether you’ve got a 3D printer connected. I assume that you’re using either Samba, PuTTY or connecting to Octoprint when it’s hosting from the Pi as a locally hosted webpage?
Yes, my desktop, I use Octoprint to control my 3D printer…supposedly by WiFi, but that’s the issue I’m having.
Hey Bill,
the best option, in this case, would be to hook up your Pi with a keyboard and monitor to see whether or not Octoprint is correctly booting and whether you’re getting any error messages. From there, I can also give you some instructions on bash commands to run that will let us identify the problems with the setup. If anyone else from the community has any suggestions or guides that they would like to link here feel free to jump in too!
Hi Bill,
I’m just catching up on this thread, Just to confirm, your pi is showing no (networked) signs of life at this stage, I’m guessing that means you can’t access it at all over the network. I’d try and plug in your keyboard, mouse, and checking the following log files:
sudo nano logfileofchoice straight into the terminal is what I find easiest even if cat or tail would be more efficient
Very odd issue and I’m keen to see this worked out!
-James
Thanks Bryce. I should be able to borrow a monitor tomorrow. Then I can see what’s going on.
Thanks for jumping in James. What does it mean if I attach the Pi to the router by ethernet cable and it still doesn’t show up on the network?
Sorry to jump in here but it sounds like the Pi itself is failing to acquire an IP address, not that it’s failing to connect to the network, which makes me suspect that it’s the router (and its DHCP server) that is at fault here. Sorry if you’ve got a complicated setup that requires a lot of configuration, but have your tried factory resetting your router? That is, putting its configuration back to factory defaults?
If you’re familiar with how your router in particular works, could you login to its webpage configuration and navigate to the DHCP server settings? It might have a few different labels, like IP settings or local zone (there is never consistency between manufacturers). You might want to hide your external IP/global IP/WAN address if this is also visible on that page.
Okay, this is strange! This morning I decided to start from first principles again. Disconnected everything, reimaged the SD card and set it all back up and…it connected!
I’m baffled, I did exactly what I did yesterday (5 times!) except I added the SSID details into ‘octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt’ on my desktop and copied it to the card when it had finished imaging. I can’t see how that would make a difference.
Anyhow, I seem to be underway…happy daze!
Thanks for jumping in Ryan. You may have seen that I got it working, I don’t know how, but it is.
However, I sure would appreciate you advice on how I make the IP address permanent for the Pi. I understand that the router will assign IPs but will overwrite disconnected devices’ addresses…maybe I’ve got that wrong.
Glad to see you got it working, but you’d want to know why it failed in the first place so you can have a reliable connection for the future.
Most routers will allow you to assign static local IP addresses to your devices either under the DHCP server/lease/local IPs settings page. This might be inside of a submenu of another page. Be sure to use the same subnet (the first three parts of your local IP addresses, in your case 10.10.10.xxx, where xxx is unique to your local device) and that it’s not in the range that your DHCP server will automatically assign IPs to (most default to using a range of xxx.xxx.xxx.100 to xxx.xxx.xxx.199, but your screenshot show some devices using xxx.xxx.xxx.221 so it may have already been manually defined). If you could mention your router’s manufacturer and model name I’d be able to give more specific instructions.
Thanks for the reply Ryan. The modem is a TELSTRA SMART MODEM GEN 2 - Modem Make Model
Technicolor DJA0231. Does that help?
That’s a pretty new modem! Relatively speaking, less than two years old is pretty new for internet connected devices. There’s not a lot of documentation online about it yet, though scouring the forums I found these Solved: Re: Renaming connected devices on Technicolour TG8... - Telstra CrowdSupport - 691729 sets of instructions to manually assign a static IP address to a device:
“If you wish to do IP reservations (as opposed to a device set static IP), you’ll need to switch to advanced mode, click on LAN, scroll down and add new Static Leases. You will need to know device MAC addresses though.”
To clarify, there are two ways to set a static IP for a device. Either the device itself can request one (which the router can reject) or the router makes a special reservation just for that device. You should always go with the latter so you avoid IP conflicts (or at least, it should be obvious when there is one as all the reserved IPs will be on that screen).
Specifically if you look at this screenshot
the boxes labelled “New start” and “New limit” show the range of addresses your router will automatically assign devices connected to it. When reserving IPs manually, try to avoid being in this range. In this example, the range starts at xxx.xxx.xxx.1 to xxx.xxx.xxx.137, so reserving an IP of xxx.xxx.xxx.151 to a device would be fine, but xxx.xxx.xxx.120 might cause conflicts. Also, xxx.xxx.xxx.255 is the highest IPv4 can go on a single subnet, so an address like xxx.xxx.xxx.268 would be invalid.
In general, you shouldn’t need to manually reserve an IP to solve a connection problem, your router should be smart enough to do that all on its own. If you’ve never made changes to this before then you shouldn’t need to change it, but it’s worth checking to see if something has changed it to cause such a conflict.
