OctoPrint Patron Survey: Results, Part 1 (Patreon)

Over the course of December 2016 I did a survey among those of you pledging at $3 and up, to get an idea of how you are using OctoPrint, what kind of features you are missing and what annoys you the most about it. The goal of this survey was to get a better idea of what I should focus on during future development in order to make OctoPrint be most valuable to you.

Back then I promised to get the evaluation of this month-long survey done in January but it turns out evaluating this thing took way more time than I anticipated - mostly thanks to the huge number of free text fields I employed to not limit you in your possible answers. With the regular project management, maintenance and development and a bunch of other stuff that got in the way I only now got around to actually finishing the evaluation - sorry for it taking so long!

All in all I got back 253 responses from you - big thanks for that! I've gone through them all and extracted a ton of very helpful information out of them.  Among other things,  I've prepared a bunch of charts for you - those marked with a little * indicate where I not only used raw numeric data from the survey, but also used the free form text replies you gave to compile an answer.  This is also going to be split into two parts, to not drown you in too huge a wall of text.

Let's start taking a look at the first part of the results, shall we? 

The first set of questions I asked you revolved around your general use of OctoPrint: how best to describe your usage scenario, how long you have been using it and how often you use it. 

Most of you - 214 all in all - claim to use OctoPrint in what could best be described as a hobbyist scenario - running your own printer, for your own private projects. 22 of you said they use OctoPrint in a more "Prosumer" kind of setting - running a small 3d printing service like e.g. 3d hubs with it.  And 15 said they use OctoPrint in a professional setting (e.g. for a larger business, running print farms etc). Something I forgot in my survey (shame on me!) but what came up twice in the free form text field available on that question: Use in hackerspaces.

I was surprised to see that 9 of you were using OctoPrint less than a month and yet had already jumped in as Patrons to supports its ongoing development - thank you! :) 32 were using it less than 6 months at the time of the survey, and 77 more said to be using it less than a year. 115 of you said they have been using OctoPrint between one and three years, 17 over three years, and one of you could still remember it being called "Printer WebUI" and therefore has been a user since its very inception - kudos :D So all in all it looks like we have a more or less even split between relatively new users (everything less than a year) and "veterans" (anything above a year).

The majority of you seem to get printing into their busy schedules at least a couple of times per week or even daily - I didn't expect such a frequent use there :)

I also asked you where you first found out about OctoPrint:

A lot of you where fighting a bit with fuzzy memory there (those of you in the "more than a year" group? ;)). What you reported back pretty much reflected what I so far was guessing: While a lot of your stumbled over OctoPrint while  doing online research on ways to remote control your printers using a search engine, the majority of you rather became users thanks to recommendations by friends, forums or generally word of mouth. Nice! :) Also: A friendly wave to the two of you who stated they'd first heard about OctoPrint at one of my talks I gave about in the past!

Next came a bunch of questions with regards to your hardware setup: What hardware you are running OctoPrint on, what webcam you have attached, what printers you run it with.

I would be lying if I said I was surprised by how many of you are running OctoPrint on (various) Raspberry Pis ;) But some of you also have opted for other options - OctoPrint is platform agnostic after all and does in fact run on other systems than the RPi too.

Since I already predicted the somewhat Pi-heavy outcome of this question I'd also asked you for the specific Pi versions you have deployed:

Note that some of you stated multiple models here - I counted all of them which is why those numbers above don't add up to 238 but actually 297 instead. So many Pis! 

This might sound weird, but it actually does make me happy to see that some of you are still sporting a Pi1B. The majority of course (unsurprisingly) have a newer model running. Admittedly the multi-core CPU of Pi2 and 3 has its advantages when it comes to on-board slicing and of course the webcam server. What did surprise me a bit here is that the Pi3 is this much ahead  of the Pi2 family. What's the most common reason for that, slightly better CPU, integrated WiFi, or all of that? Tell me in the comments please :)

I also asked you what webcams you are using with OctoPrint. Considering how many of you are using the Pi as their base system, it shouldn't be too surprising that the RPi camera wins here:

But it also makes me very happy to see that with my tendency towards deploying USB cameras instead of the RPi camera I'm at least not alone. I was actually surprised to see how close both "factions" are to each other. I kind of expected dedicated IP cameras (which OctoPrint is compatible to too) to not clock in a lot here, but still great to see that at least some of you are using them :)

Let's take a closer look at the RPi and the USB cam faction:

While most of you do use the regular RPi camera, a handful does utilize the IR version aka "Noir". It would interest me how well that does work for you - I'm assuming you are doing it due to a low light situation, potentially with IR LED lights? Please let me know in the comments below!

Taking a closer look at the USB cameras it's easy to spot a certain vendor preference:

And drilling further down into this:

I have to admit, I had a somewhat smug grin on my face when this result popped up. The C270 is also my go-to camera for printer use :) And the C920 is what records OctoPrint On Air :D

I mentioned that I also asked you about the printers you are using OctoPrint with. There were no huge surprises in there and I have to admit that the sheer amount of the various vendors and models you reported made it utterly impossible to compile a chart that would still have been readable. But what I can tell you is that the top 5 brand names were Prusa Research, Lulzbot, Printrbot, Ultimaker and - not a brand name per se but on the fifth place nevertheless - various RepRap-based designs. And even the brand name printers usually had a little "heavily modified" next to it. It made me happy to see the amount of DIY spirit there! :)

Evaluating the list of plugins you stated to have installed took a long time, but what finally fell out of that is a Top-10:

We have a very long tail here though - all in all you mentioned 50 plugins. Since this kind of information is also very interesting to plugin authors and of course users (many installs means probably a good plugin), I'm looking into options on how to get some more real-time information on these kind of things in the future - only with consent of course! I'll get back to you about that in the future.

I also wanted to know if you had any issues getting OctoPrint setup the first time:

Apparently most of you didn't. Those of you that did stated a bunch of different issues:

• getting the camera to run: at least on OctoPi, for best results make sure to either use the RPi camera or a USB camera that supports MJPG natively - the survey results above give you a good hint what works ;)
• getting OctoPrint to talk to their printer: some vendors sadly make stuff tricky here by using proprietary or heavily modified firmware, but at least some issues should now be resolved with the new firmware autodetection in OctoPrint 1.3.x
• setting up WiFi or generally the network: This is even more an OctoPi issue I'd say. Considering the huge "market share" of the Pi3 these days, looking into something a bit comfortable here might be possible (hardware fragmentation with Pi1 and Pi2 WiFi dongles makes it pretty much impossible to do things like hotspot creation reliably). It still would be great to get some more feedback on what was the problem with octopi-network.txt - use the comments for some clarification here please :)
• lack of documentation: Sadly those of you stating that were a bit too unspecific in what regards they found the available instructions lacking, so more details in the comments would be great! :)
• problems with some plugins
• getting their display to run
• getting on-board slicing to work

That closes Part 1 of the Survey Results. In Part 2 we'll tackle what was the trickiest to evaluate, simply due to the volume of text: Your responses to the questions of what features you are missing in OctoPrint the most, and what annoys you the most about OctoPrint. We'll also take a look at how you update OctoPrint and what your experiences - if any - were with plugin development. And finally I'll tell you what I'll do with that data!