How can I use simple means to monitor whether the printer is still running? A first possibility is probably the use of a Raspi and Octoprint for monitoring. That was too complicated and too expensive for me. As an alternative, I tried using an ESP32 + USB host shield to get the data via the USB port, finally I was able to send and receive data with the Arduino IDE. Unfortunately I couldn't get a stable connection. That's when the idea was born to monitor the movement of the head. Various sensors were used for this. The best result was achieved with a shock sensor based on the SW-18010p.
The sensor signals should be sent to an MQTT broker. From there, various notification and monitoring actions are possible. With me, this runs together with Openhab on a Raspi.
An ESP8266 is used to send the sensor signals. The mini variant ESP01 should be enough for this. There's just one catch: the sensor's idle signal is set to "low" and the only two pins that are brought out of the ESP01 must not be set to "low" when starting. So another npn transistor is needed to turn the low signal into a high signal. In addition, a voltage regulator 5V -> 3.3V is required because I want to use a USB signal as the power source.
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