Raspberry Pi Zero W and Octoprint Part 1

One thing I really love about my Prusa MK3 and especially about the Einsy Rambo board is the ability to stack a Raspberry Pi Zero W on that board. No external power source or cabling required.

I have to admit that I used my original MK3 with the SD card for months until I did the Raspberry Pi Zero W upgrade. Now I don't want to miss it anymore. I am using the Telegram bot plugin, to receive messages from my printer and send commands with my smart phone.

And because I like it so much I also want to have this on my cloned MK3.

So what you need is the Raspberry Pi Zero W(for WLAN) itself.
A memory card, as priced dropped on black Friday and you never have enough I used a 16Gb card this time.
The 3D printed frame, that is available from Prusa.
And a 18mm GPIO header dual male strip. This is important as the "usual" ones are to short!
And maybe most important soldering equipment and skill!!

Then I would recommend printing a new case for the MK3 that allows you to get access to the Pi without the need to disassemble the whole printer every time. You can find plenty on Thingiverse or use the one from Prusa.
I am using this one Thingiverse MK3 case for Pi

I strongly recommend to follow this instructions from Prusa which are very good and also contain links to the Octoprint Image that is already prepared for the MK3, the Pi frame and the updated chassis for the electronics.

Manual Prusa MK3 Octoprint with Raspberry Pi Z W

And if you want to monitor and control your MK3 from your smartphone I recommend the Telegram plugin for Octoprint.
OctoPrint Telegram Plugin

But one thing I will mention as a warning. Be very careful touching the Pi with your hands, you might destroy the Pi with electrostatic charges. So I recommend to touch something grounded before.
Also be careful with the soldering. If not all pins have proper contact it will not work, your printer might noch even boot. Or worse, if you short the GPIOs then you might even damage the Einst Rambo board.

The Pi Zero does not have as much compute power as the Pi 3. This is why I would not make too much use of the streaming feature. Yes, you can attach a webcam or the Raspberry Pi cam to the Pi zero. You can use it to send you photos of the finished print or stream the whole print. But keep in mind, the Pi also sends the commands to the printer. If he is too busy doing other things this might have an impact on your print.
The other thing I would not recommend is to use the slicing feature in octoprint. Basically it allows you to send STL instead of GCODE to the Pi. You can install an older Cure version that will do the slicing job then. There is also a plugin for Slic3r.
I rather perform the slicing on my computer. It is faster and much more easy to change configuration and print settings as on the octoprint plugins.