Big Tree Tech Klipper Pad7 Setup and Review

in this video I'm going to be reviewing and setting up the big tree Tech Clipper pad 7. this is a new product which makes it really easy to get started with Clipper for 3D printers but what is Clipper well I made this handy diagram to explain everything because it is kind of confusing when you first come into it all right let's get started all right so Clipper is a way of inner interfacing with 3D printers now in the past you would have a slicing program that would generate G-Code and then you would stream that G-Code to your printer the printer itself the firmware would have usually something called marlin on it which is a type of firmware that would interpret the G-Code and then do all the math and then move the motors around to print the stuff the problem is older printers they only had 8-bit MCU so they couldn't do math very well also they were slow and they might not be optimized so what Clipper does is it puts like a generic firmware on all the printers with base configurations and then all of the heavy math is done in a Linux box so let's set this up here okay okay so first of all you have a Linux box and the Linux box has usually at least three elements on it it has the Clipper software so this is like they call it the Clipper firmware but I don't like calling it that because firmware should be like on a microcontroller so the Clipper software this is what actually does all the math so the G-Code comes into it this does all the math and the movement calculations and then it sends very low level commands over the USB bus or however you connect to your printer to an existing 3D printer motherboard now this motherboard does need to be reflashed with new code to make it work with Clipper but once it is faster this new code it basically becomes like kind of a dumb terminal where it takes low level commands from Clipper and drives Motors basically and also reads the sensors and it's pretty remarkable because in my test like you can not only can you get you can get a lot more speed out of these old printers but the the motors in my test stayed cool as a cucumber which is pretty hard to believe considering how fast they were going so there's a lot of magic juice going on here okay so if you dial it back a bit so the Clipper software interfaces with a Moonraker API server which basically exposes the Clipper software functions to other programs such as Mainsail which is what the one that comes with the Clipper pad main cell is a web UI that allows you to interface with everything in Clipper that's what you drag and drop your G-Code files to that's where you do your configuration settings there's other interfaces such as fluid you can also use octoprint but all of those interfaces will interact with Moonraker which will then interact with clipper so then you access Mainsail with a web browser or the Clipper pad in this case and there's actually another element called Clipper screen which runs the screen but yeah let's just say it's a web browser so the web browser or an app on your phone will talk to Mainsail and that's the best way for you to interface with it uh you also do some of the setup with SSH commands into the Linux system but once you get started you don't need to worry about that at all so then you have your favorite slicing program so this program will create G-Code like it always does although you'll probably have different starting and ending scripts and you can probably also go a little faster so you generate the G-Code then use the web browser to stick it into Mainsail then main sale sends it down the road to the Cooper software which then tells the Clipper firmware on your printer how to print so the Clipper pad has everything that's in the Linux box portion already set up so we just need to set up the printer configuration within that now something you can also do and you can do with the Clipper PAD as well you can actually install multiple instances of clipper but you actually have to have entirely new instances so you need another Clipper software another Moonraker and another Mainsail or octoprint or fluid we're just going to do a single one in this test although based off the processor loads that I saw while testing I think you could probably easily get at least four of them onto one pad all right well that all that's set up out of the way let's get started I've talked about this several times but I might as well talk about it again the main thing I use 3D printers for these days are making parts for the accessibility controllers that I build for people with disabilities specifically you got your shaft here cap here a new d-pad there in the center so it can be hit by either side extra a b x y buttons and of course the trigger on the back so yeah I uh I print parts for this all the time I still print these uh black TPU buttons on the old MakerBot but yeah that's what I spend most of my time 3D printing and uh I think it was 20 20. yeah honestly it was like September of 2020 we were doing a zoom call because we were for mgc the Midwest Gaming Classic we were doing Zoom calls because the show was canceled of course and that was like in September and someone was like I remember because I just just gotten Bud the kitten and someone was like Hey Ben there's a printer on uh Amazon for 150 dollars which back then was really cheap and I think was that any cubic zero or whatever so I bought it because I thought I'd be fun to like check out a printer that cheap then I made a video and then since then any cubic is like oh you made a video about our printer so they keep sending me printers to uh evaluate and then it just kind of goes from there so then recently I had big tree Tech sent me a Clipper pad to evaluate so that just came in today so I thought we would take a look at it actually uh hung out with the uh big tree tech people at their booth at Murph they were all very nice people and actually their CEO was there and it was his first time ever visiting the United States because he's from China and he was a really nice guy I I wasn't able to really communicate with him but he showed me a lot of cool pictures from his Factory so they've actually come quite a long ways so big tree Tech I don't think I ever made a video about it but they basically make driver boards for 3D printers so if you want to like upgrade your older 3D printer you can put in a big tree tech board uh they usually have like SKR series I started like with 1.3 then they went up to two and I think they're up to three now and they actually gave me one of those as well to evaluate which I was looking into but they also have products for Clipper so Clipper is the new hotness that I learned all about at Murph basically the idea is it's kind of like octoprint except for you're doing all of the heavy calculations on your host computer like your Linux box your Raspberry Pi or whatever then you create new firmware or Clipper compiles new firmware which goes under your 3D printer and your 3D printer becomes basically like a dumb stepper driver which is good because you have an older 3D printer with an 8-bit CPU it's not going to do math very well it's not going to have floating points at all actually a lot of them don't have floating point so anyway one of the issues though is you know oh we're gonna put Clipper on a Raspberry Pi but you can't get Raspberry Pi so one of the better Solutions is actually buy a big tree Tech pad seven there's other pads but this is the one made by uh big tree Tech so this acts as your host so you don't have to try to find an unobtainium Raspberry Pi and this whole solution doesn't cost too much more than what you have to scalp a pie for these days so yeah let's do an unboxing and see if we can get this set up I was going to replace the electronics in my Maker Gear M2 I was thinking about bumping that up to an SKR 3. however I do have do I have any other 8-bit printers here all right is this this is just a super quick start guide oh it's got like a stand CB1 I believe what they did was they made something the same form factor as one of the new Raspberry Pi compute modules that you can't find so if you want you can actually swap in a Raspberry Pi compute module in 2027. so basically this is a big Raspberry Pi with a screen on it I assume it's already pre-installed with clipper oh boy more stickers oh I should put these on my uh big tree Tech printer actually they have their own brand new printer now it's called a BQ I don't have to worry about that coming loose in the shipping okay oh it's got a oh it's got a can bus one of the pins is slightly broken yeah apparently can bus is also the new hotness like these printers will put though they'll use USBC to drive a can bus because it's just two differential signals and then they'll use the power of the USBC to actually power the elements yeah spy that's probably for an input shaper SD card this probably holds the OS well there's quite a few ports on it I guess you would put this in front of a printer or multiple printers oh there's the duck I'm going to critique other countries plugs Australia plug super cool UK plug super dumb Europe it looks like something from like a 1940s toaster and then America plug not as cool as Australia plug I think I think China actually uses the UK one don't quote me on that leave a comment below thank you I would say commenting helps the algorithm but all of those Indiana Jones videos I made destroy the algorithm so never mind oh this is uh input shaper head come on get out get out of the box get out of the bag yeah yeah this is an accelerometer that you hook up to your head and so it goes and then the accelerometer senses the shake and then it can store that data and then do a profile so much like bed leveling the printer can compensate for the Resonance of the printer put the America plug on it America plug F yeah coming again to plug in things now kind of weird you think that would plug into the side of it there's anything on it s big tree Tech activate ah this is really difficult to film generic big tree Tech blah blah blah config does not exist oh I suppose we had to put it in there is this booting off of the SD card does this do anything oh wait a second let me uh let me take a photo of this air even though I've also recorded it on the on the camera is it redundancy or laziness leave a comment below oh stereo speakers look at that you can play some music on this oh yeah look slice time correction so if it's inaccurate you could tweak the inaccuracy very scientific um screen it's not the greatest screen oh I just turned it off now this green doesn't work at all uh yeah the screen's okay great I'm going to reboot that was not graceful I stuck the SD card in my laptop has a Linux boot system on it looks like it's sort of all winter chip this thing is running off of it's not too much of a surprise considering it comes from China it's pretty popular uh arm chip over there anyway yeah I guess I'm gonna have well it said go into home so I guess I'm gonna have to get into the Linux system on this um I guess all the instructions are online so I guess I'm gonna have to go online and read the instructions and then continue from there I've connected to my network I looked it up online apparently I have to use the web interface to set up a printer configuration file so this thing will at least uh bootstrap itself here's the web interface same message it needs a config file I went online actually I just went to the Clipper GitHub and I found one for Maker Gear M2 so I was thinking about upgrading my makergram to really I just want to add a BL touch and I thought about putting that SKR 3 in it but maybe I could just use this this way I wouldn't have to rewire anything I mean I might have to wire up the BL touch I guess I could try it I mean worst case scenario I have to reflash it I think it's got the original firmware from 2016 in it anyway all right so that's a config file so I saved it just the file itself so let's see upload file oh this will do it right over the uh yeah I don't even need to putty into this I can just do it this way okay upload of printer config file successful so apparently the front of it like printer Dash that the prefix means that this is a known like mainstream printer yeah let's see uh restart from where we start well I don't have the firmware yet let's just restart this okay so printer config oh that's okay I see include main cell config okay that's probably important get the impression this is going to be a pound sign yeah Okay so include my config file oh cool okay we got the Clipper at least the host version working and now we got it connected to the printer which means I have to figure out how to flash the printer I think those printers well it's more or less an Arduino so it should have a bootloader on it so you should be able to update the firmware over the USB cable config files root config config examples well wait here's all yeah this is the same thing I saw on GitHub like I could have just grabbed that Maker Gear file right here can I move it what can I do with it I can download it oh so what I would download it to this computer and then re-upload it back into uh config oh look this one won't let you upload this is like a static directory see these icons changed that's weird so I was looking at it uh through Windows terminal so clipper LS so if you go into config here you see all the samples uh yeah so this config folder in Linux is actually the config examples folder in the web interface which is kind of weird yeah and you can see docs is there that one matches what's here well anyway through this interface you can also do the you could compile the firmware that actually goes onto your printer so you go make menu config of course I had to look this up I don't know how any of this works so yeah we're going to say a low level stuff microcontroller architecture AVR processor model 2560 aka the uh what was that called the Arduino Mega yes 16 megahertz would be correct you are at zero would be correct that goes into a converter chip USB to uart converter chip baud rate for serial port uh I want to say it's like 115 200 right now hmm I should probably double check that so this must basically be like a really low level microcontroller configurator and then every all the magic happens with the config file that we loaded earlier yeah okay let's say that's what we want yeah that did it CD out so I've already done this clipper.elf.hex that would be the thing to use is AVR dude on this system it is so yes if you hook the printer up to this we should be able to flash we should be able to flash it with this Clipper pad over USB okay change of plans with the 3D printer Clipper project a buddy of mine was come and hang out this weekend and he's the one that I gave that any cubic Mega zero to the one that I did a review on like in 2020 the 150 printer and I was like Hey do you do you still have that thing he's like yeah I never really did much with it I'm like could you bring it back so I'm like this is the perfect example for Clipper like this is like but I'm trying to do a video this is like the weakest printer I have here it's got a 80 Mega 128 board so it's a definitely an 8-bit Beast because we should be able to put new firmware on this using the Clipper pad okay so that is the uh any cubic Mega zero it actually has one of those ancient uh a USB to serial adapter chips so it's very old school so this would be what we put into Clipper all right so actually I have the uh yeah I'm gonna go ahead and upload I found a configuration file for a Clipper for this printer so I'm gonna go ahead and upload that yeah let's see upload no upload file all right big tree Tech blah blah blah blah dig the elves dug too greedily and Too Deep there we go mzconfig so I should be able to go over here and just add an include happy little clouds MZ config okay that should in the MZ config file we need to find the MCU all right so we have to take what we found in Linux copy that looks like yeah see how it's got a similar name but it's going to have a different ID so sure that's the right one A6 if00 Port zero okay cool nice so let's save and close back over here bud jumped onto my chair go back to the user directory clipper and let's see what was that uh make clean clean up that make menu config I think it was yeah there we go okay board architecture is going to be Jank mistake and it's a oh it says right here in the config file AVR at at Mega 1284p right all right so get that 16 megahertz uh yeah I think yeah it would be 16. it's a bog standard at Mel uart zero yeah that's only baud rate for serial port well this would be after I flash it because this would be a separate procedure than yeah so that would be the new baud rate I assume I think this should all be right you know this is the first time I've ever done this so I'm just going to do blog standard AVR 1284p all right so let's see everything's good Q safe and configuration make then I found this page here which talks about how to do the bootloader commands they already have AVR dude on this Clipper pad so I should be able to just use this command because there should be a bootloader on there already well or would there be I guess we'll find out I think it does have a bootloader I was doing some research uh yeah so we shouldn't have to re-program the bootloader we should just be able to use the bootloader to reprogram the application area I have no idea if this is going to work or not Clipper flipper no Clipper dot elf I think I had the wrong command come on can't open device wait it's talking about TTY ama0 that's weird I wonder why that would work that seems kind of generic wait that time it worked and I just typed in this okay I must have reset it so if I go over to the screen it should be dead uh no not entirely okay all right so let's put the rest of this in here see this part I mean this varies by every printer so although the thing I keep seeing with the Clipper it's like well this isn't this isn't it's not necessarily that like meant to be like the super easy straightforward thing okay so Port zero baud rate and then D flash out Clipper oh wait I think we're already in the in that folder so watch Ben fumble around in Linux how much fun could you ever want out of a video oh darn it that's the one with the ama0 oh come on all right serial device no such fire to come how about that come on oh there we go it's writing sweet nice now it's verifying cool all right so let's go back to the root there's no S command I can't believe it all right actually yeah that wouldn't change because there's a convert there's a USB serial converter chip that's talking to the atmel chip because that type of MCU does not have dedicated USB so therefore this is the name of the converter chip not actually the atmel chip let's go save and close Okay so let's go to printer config let's comment that back in saving close let's do firmware restart uh oh is it connected did it work is it secret is it safe 20 Celsius what Alexa what is 20 degrees Celsius in America units 68 degrees in my basement that sounds correct all right well in theory the oh yeah the Clipper pad updated as well so this web interface is fun and all but let's actually go over to the machine look it updated this screen as well does it actually do anything oh it does oh that's awesome the Clipper firmer that goes on the microcontroller is generic it's because it's based off the microcontroller not the printer how does it know to make this screen work okay that part's cool that's impressive because it just worked but the real thing is obviously the Clipper pad right here part fan see this is the thing I think I might have plugged this in in wrong well actually the part fan will be in the one on the side oh yeah that worked I guess this fan just runs all the time okay so I guess I must have hooked the part fan up correctly all right let's see what else we got um go back move y x okay let's try to go up in the z-axis let's go 10 millimeters must home first okay hey bud it's working it's working and stop Z still triggered after retract oh crap I had to I have to I have to fix that yeah the little uh blade connector was breaking and I had to solder it to fix it because they don't really have a very good strain relief on that let's try that again cool all right so let's go let's go 50 50 up riveting content uh okay it should have the Cartesian dimensions of this printer should have been in the config file so let's see if it'll go past the edge yep it won't let me that's cool I don't know once I found the right command for AVR dude it worked perfectly fine uh yeah so I assume there would be a folder what's this oh these must be macros oh you probably can Define your own macros I assume oh there's a whole bunch of them what's this oh that's probably oh that was probably e-stop can you use this to change the filament let's see extruder oh there we go oh I heard the oh my gosh I don't know if you could the fan decreased in speed because this thing only has a 12 volt power supply so the the extruder made the fan slow down a little bit the configuration file that I found off the internet it had a section which specified what kind of LCD is on the machine so that's how that worked it wasn't magic after all that filament get all mucked up oh it's all dried out oh yeah so me and my friend we actually updated the mega zero to a big tree Tech a motherboard uh I don't like winter of 2020. but I actually took that out and put the original crappy board back into lobotomize it to make it the most the most uh basically yeah to make it really old make a good candidate for this they actually do have uh Clipper profiles for the see big tree Tech made a drop in replacement board for the Indie cubic Mega zero is like specifically designed for that printer and that's like a 32-bit processor but yeah I wanted the old 8-bit one yeah I was looking at the settings here like this thing is like really slow like 190 seems kind of low for uh pla but it's probably because there's only a 12 volt uh motor in it yes print speed 40 millimeters a second so let's do this I'm going to just print something small and I'll I should be able to up upload the G-Code from Kira into the Clipper web interface G-Code files I wonder if I could just click and drag oh that was pretty obvious okay so then do I just print this then how this works oh there's the files right there all right now let's see what happens oh yes let's do it this is my first try uh three or four days ago I spent a few hours one night like researching all of this kind of like after I unboxed the pad and before I did this obviously and uh well you know what I shouldn't say it was easy until I actually see it printing something so I'm not going to say that quite yet yeah there's no heated bed on this printer so once it hits 190 you're going to see some serious stuff there's a little bit of stuff on the printhead from when I was purging it [Music] remember kids always stick your hands into Machinery that's what the cool people do oh man that is printing a huge is that a skirt what is that it's like skirt layers 500 oh it defaults to brim so it's printing a huge Brim I think there might be some extruder issues with this printer like with the hot end uh that's nothing that we can change in Clipper while that prints at an excruciatingly slow 40 millimeters a second here's a cat I gotta love this really redundant screen over here but I like how they make everything in really big fonts so it's easier to read because remember like you might you might not have a clip or pad you might have Clipper installed on a Raspberry Pi so this probably would be the only screen you'd see at the printer I am hearing some Crunchies with the extruder oh it looks like this part's not put on fully but it appears to be printing properly 81 so of course the next thing I'm going to do is bump it up to oh I don't know let's try 150. that's weird for some reason they said the part is canceled okay now I kind of do Z or do I have to home that too no I have to home everything okay so some weirdness at the end but it did work okay so this is gonna be a 150 test even though it's much faster in millimeters per second the print time only went down to six minutes from eight minutes before probably because the part is so small it probably can't get up to speed too much like if you're printing like a big Cube or something you'd probably see a bigger uh change in speed print time [Music] oh yeah that's definitely a difference but your new nickname is a goo goober who drives for Uber that is your new name what do you think about that so my original intention was to update this Maker Gear M2 this is the 2016 model this one has a I think it's either ramps or Rambo board which is based off the atmega 2560 again it's an older 8-bit processor it's got a lot of flash storage but yeah it's older uh but yeah this is a really solid printer but I just feel like it's held back by its CPU the BL touch probe see normally this printer Z's at the bottom so it actually goes down here hits a switch and then it goes like negative like 180 millimeters back up to the printhead which seems kind of backwards and also like the leveling procedure is really obtuse in this printer so I'm gonna see if I can hook the BL touch up to some extra pins on the ramps board and then in theory you should be able to Define what pins you hooked up the BL touch to in the Clipper configuration file and then add the BL touch to your exist existing board we opened up the box and never looked at it before actually it's a ramble board so I've got a BL touch that I added so I adjusted these Dupont connectors so I can hook this up to where it's supposed to go on the system the BL touch has a connector it's basically like a little Servo plus a switch so I connected the switch portion into the Z Min Port this printer actually uses a Max Z so I'll just leave that plugged in for now and uh yeah so I think it's pin 44 in the Arduino mapping or pl5 in the CPU mapping that should be all I need okay I made a backup of both the Flash and the eprom all right I've got the Rambo board plugged into Clipper here is its path right so let's see where's MCU setting oh there it is Dev serial by ID and then that save that um let's see here we are okay processor model 2560 what are the extra options uh those extra options look pretty standard should be good quit save configuration and make okay AVR dude see wiring at Mega 25 60 oh we're already in this folder so we don't need that I got this from the Clipper documentation let's see if it works oh there it is it's writing so again it had a bootloader what the what are you doing did Isaac Newton discover gravity or did cats okay that should be updated okay so in theory I should be able to go into printer config and let's get rid of that let's we're gonna have different macros so let's do this that's the config file we want to use save and close firmware restart okay it says it's awake all right let's see if it worked after about an hour of messing around with this BL touch I thought it was broken so I grabbed an old bent one out of a box same issue than I realized it's these neodymium magnets I'm using for the quick release so you have this all done this is all done magnetic quick release that I read I redesigned the extruder on this yeah so if it's a little bit further away turn it off turn it on that's what it's supposed to do yeah but if you get a little bit too close yeah that neodymium magnet right there it's messing it up I guess I couldn't I'd have to oh gosh I'll have to reprint the part take this up well then it's kind of bump it into these into these cables here see I already made something to move all that cabling to the right see that little linkage in there that's what that's for oh shoot I didn't think attaching a BL touch to this would be like taking the ring to Mount Doom yeah so I've got to take this apart now so the filament's going through that so I actually have to hope this will heat up so I can remove the filament the temperatures look valid for a basement and where's here another actions extrude temperature pla fans are kicking on that's a good sign oh cool the correct fan turned on so yeah that's the uh that's a stepper fan and this is the part cooling fan [Applause] all right will it work that girl oh no I don't have a filament I don't have them I don't know I don't have a macro there it goes can never have enough ASCII charts [Applause] I just want to put this up and rip it out there done yeah so okay let's get enough see yeah it's kind of convenient for clearing a filament Jam but I never really had a problem with it so let's combine this into one piece yeah this was the design file for the new and improved extruder that I designed in Fusion 360. yeah so there's a separate magnet mounted piece for the filament guide that's in case the filament uh gets stuck and it's uh never really happened so there's no reason that this piece couldn't just be connected to this piece behind it so I think I'll make copies of both and then I'll just do a fused version a fused Fusion version that way I can just omit these magnets and keep the magnetic field away from the BL touch there's still some magnets up here but they shouldn't affect it they're Magnets How do those even work so I'm going to take this and I'm going to do a combine and the tool body is going to be this and we're going to combine them don't keep the tools all right cool now that's one solid part it's one of those like stupid problems to find you know and you're kind of glad when you find them but then it's like ah it's so obvious [Music] what bud do you think you have an idea of how to fix this I mean do you know what all these wires and compositions and Alloys are you're just a goo goober who drives for Uber I'm printing the new part on the creality K1 it's a still a pretty solid printer I've been using it for a few things here and there uh it does still have like some line layer issues see when something changes actually I got a better example of that I designed this and printed it with Hyper pla uh yeah [Music] yeah it seems to happen like where you know you have these long sections where it's fine but then when things start to change that's when you've got a few line issues so yeah I'm still not exactly sure what causes that pretty cool huh oh and there's a magnet on each one okay it's printed yeah my main issue with that creality K1 is yeah sometimes you'll see like line layer artifacts like right there I think it's triggered by that hole the filament guide hole yeah I mean other than that it's a really solid printer but I don't know maybe there's some sort of software thing that would fix that oh no one of the one of the screw holes was covered up by the formerly removable filament guide ah three screws is enough you don't know you don't anymore you're never gonna need more than 640 K of RAM yeah it's like having big honking arms on these printers and you have like a lot of force grabbing the filament end you can just do this and quickly remove the filament just release it all and just rip it right out yeah it's like that um and I'm probably jinxing Myself by not testing this first I'm quite sure that was the problem I mean what else would it be and then you just do that boom success okay I was following the Clipper instructions I think I have to reverse the z-axis kind of expected that let's see stepper Z Direction pin is not pl2 so I think if we make that pl2 that should invert the direction of Z save and restart okay go back to dashboard home all now it should Center probe out oh there we go the one thing that might be an issue in this printer is if the if the Z Motor isn't energized if it's not it held in a energized State gravity will actually cause this whole bed to drop down which isn't great but I guess what I could do is I could make a oh oh yeah there it goes right there see that's not great you can make it why did it give up is there some sort of no trigger on Z after full movement I think I might need to change that config file it's a config file wasn't taking a BL touch into account oh that time it worked cool now I just need to figure out the nozzle offset from the end of the BL touch and then it should be ready to go okay Clipper probe calibrate is that a something we can just send here apparently yes oh wow is it moving the head to where the to where the probe actually was oh it did very cool oh this is nice oh I like this here let me uh let me start up the camera potent potables for 800. this potable is potent all right let's see so of course this thing is upside down so we actually want to go down I think is this up which way okay on the screen here we've got oh wait I'm screen capturing it so I don't have to describe it because you can see it all right let's uh let's try this one millimeter let's go a little less moved out of range this procedure seems so cool until it wasn't uh okay there's gotta be a way I can get around this oh we need to set the position minimum to be lower than zero negative two should work save and restart yeah it's going to be a problem if the motors aren't energized I wonder there's a way you can fix that in the firmware okay this should allow us to go past the limit okay send probe calibrate oh not that probe calibrate all right let's go negative one we have two three four five all right let's get our thing in there one more I think and I'm still out of range how it's Z negative 1.432 okay so I've got to go further negative one negative one negative one negative one negative one okay we're at negative one millimeter oh I can feel the friction now that feels pretty good all right I'm going to go ahead and accept it I think we also have to uh oh yeah save config command so save config oh no it's a conflict well we can just write down the number 3.475 millimeters what do I have to go into this file erase the value save and close don't restart go back to dashboard and do save config again yep okay so since there was a value there I didn't like that I tried to save over it the one thing I noticed that was a little weird like the uh the Z positioning looked like it was not quite right yeah let's see where's this thing think it's at space screen tell us where are we at in space green it doesn't actually the Clipper pad doesn't show as the XY position okay all right I may be an American but there's no way that's 125 millimeters so there must be something wrong with the um there must be something wrong with the Z diffuser uh yeah I think there must be something wrong with scaling for the lead screw or the Z lead screw yeah this uh rotation distance number was incorrect they said it was eight but it's actually 3.175 who told me this chat e p t f t w I double checked it with a metric ruler that's right Americans have metric rulers you'll never stop us now let me see how well I do on this one oh yeah you know we're gonna get some America units up there and uh and see how she chooches score 25 23 to 25. [Music] looks pretty good yeah because yeah I'm gonna have to recalibrate that Z offset now look at this I mean why don't people love AI look at this scale that change it to mm for a complete Revolution it's great as long as you don't attach machine guns to it you should be okay oh obviously I have to try to print something with this how fast did this thing go before 120 I don't think it actually went that fast I think Marlin firmware limited it to like more like 80. so let's go save as new and we're going to call this Maker Gear 24 volt V2 hot in blah blah blah what's it called Clipper yeah Clipper all right all right now we have make sure we have the old one still okay cool get rid of all the ending and starting scripts whereas notepad plus plus we need it let's see so our modified right so let's go back over to speed yeah let's go up let's go 150 update profile all right so we're gonna just uh omit starting and ending scripts even though we'll have that same issue where it stops right on the print which is kind of lame but I just want to make sure it works so uh let's see repair to print five minutes okay this is gonna be at 150 millimeters a second so I'm going to copy this over and we'll see what happens I am starting to smell the special sauce with Clipper the fact that you can Flash the firmware once and then do all of the configurations with this web interface all right I wonder if this will work what's the worst that could happen oh I could break the glass that's the worst that could happen oh here we go 215 Celsius I'm gonna churn or burn foreign [Applause] going on again this is gonna do like a yeah it's just gonna go as you can see this is having some first layer adhesion oh there it goes yeah I may need to adjust that Z this is the first time I ever attached a BL touch with this printer I've been wanting to put a BL touch on this printer for years you know that probably wasn't even an adhesion issue it was just a uh not primed nozzle issue but this printer used to do it would go over here they would do a nice Purge off the side which would then hang off the side so I'll just program that in I also noticed when it was doing the Homing to the left on the x-axis it was going a little too far because this fan was bumping into this over here so yeah but okay so ninety percent of the time was dialing in the BL touch which had nothing to do with the Clipper is because of a magnet that I had in my design other than that it's been pretty straightforward and you know just because I'm anal retentive I kept a backup I got I did a flash read of what was on this ramble board because I don't think I've ever updated the firmware on this and I bought this thing in 2016. here's a print at 150 millimeters a second it looks really good I just have to make sure the ending script works the Z is actually probably maybe not squished quite enough but uh yeah let's try 200 200 millimeters a second and then it uh then it moves back to zero zero and the tool head was really close to that clamp over there and I'm like that's not 15 millimeters I may be an American but I can imagine 15 millimeters I've made that joke a couple times haven't I this next part took me quite a while to figure out I spent most of Saturday afternoon fiddling around with this so and that is the start and end macros so let's go into printer config so uh these are the things you have to include like Mainsail you talk about these the board is it's the CB1 which is there again it's big tree text version of the Raspberry Pi and then I've also set up the accelerometer which I'm going to show you in a little bit here and the probe points for the residence tester blah blah blah anyway down here uh Ben macros so if we go back to Ben macros okay so these are the macros that I created for this printer see how it says so it's G-Code macro space start print G-Code colon and then everything's indented so this is very well I think it actually does go through python so this is all very python see how the context changes based off of the indent so you actually want to indent this stuff okay so I'm using simplify 3D so in the starting script you do start underscore print that's the name of your macro bed underscore temp equals and this part here in the curlies this is what actually is specified to simplify 3D it might be different for other slicers such as Cura you can you can find it online although sometimes the information might vary so for this one it's material bed temperature layer 0 extruder temp equals material print temperature layer zero and I also added clip height equals six because I've got the little red Clips on the end of mine haha I don't even need to zoom in in editing that'll save me like one second I actually had chat GPT help me with this as well so these are parameters that we're creating and these match what are being passed in from the starting script macro and simplify 3D and yes well actually I'm sorry these are the local parameters and then params.bed temp these are the parameters coming from simplify so we're going to set those and then G9 oh first be home g28 g90 is absolute coordinates and then the first thing we do is we we'll have to be home we raise the Z to be the height of the clips times two and I was basically doing that just to like torture chat GTP and making it write all this code for me and it did a pretty good job except for this part I had to tweak a little bit then it's going to go just off the edge of the table so the table is 200 millimeters wide goes just off the edge and kind of brings it forward and then it goes down just above the table that's this Command right here so I do that again so it doesn't hit the clip so it goes above the clips moves off the table then goes down then it does an extruder Purge then it's wipes the extruder on the edge lifts it up and then everything starts your main print starts so the problem I had something I had issues with here was I was setting the the temperature uh the hot ended bed commands here manually like what is it like m190 and m104 but I was having trouble with it it kept like it would heat up but then as soon as the print started the hot ends would would turn off it was so confusing so the best way to do what I found was to just bring this stuff in here and it's weird though I don't know if these match some other macros or something but this passes in the correct values because if you don't pass in the correct values the defaults are used so I tested it by passing in 59 and like 215. all right so then in simplify 3D ending script is just End Print turns everything off then it does a relative move to clear the part so it goes Z up ten so the reason you want relative versus absolute because if you say Z10 it's going to go to 10 millimeters above the bed but if you switch to relative mode and then go Z10 it's going to move 10 millimeters up from where it currently is so that's why we go relative move absolute and then we bring the table forward and put it on the bottom so that when it hits the bottom it'll go on the rest thing that I'm about to build and then it won't you know fall out in Via gravity and then here's something else that I took a while to dig around um if you hit pause or cancel print in in Mainsail it will use a built-in macro that's obfuscated but if you want to replace it you say G-Code macro pause rename existing base pause so I guess that's the one that's built in and then you say okay what do we want to do and then we have all these default parameters and we're not passing any parameters in so this is going to use the default because another thing that's happening if I hit pause the printer would go back to like the rear left corner but I'm like oh my gosh it's going to hit one of the clips okay home X home y oh the thing that kind of tipped me off to the Z being off was when it does the Z probe thing it actually first moves the Z to a safe distance like a safe hop distance and then it uh then it moves back to zero zero and the tool head was really close to that clamp over there and I'm like that's not 15 millimeters I may be an American but I can imagine 15 millimeters I've made that joke a couple times haven't I I'm printing a mount for this thing but oh my gosh look at this going super fast this is at 300 I hope I don't make anything release Magic Smoke measurements look accurate idea is that the platform will rest on this instead of the Z Max end stop right there 208 cool it worked okay input shaping so the pad 7 came with this board it's got an 80 XL 345 accelerometer on it it shows the positions the x y and z so Z Plus so X positive on this printer is this way y positive is that way so I need to mount this like that and then I'll have to invert the Z even though well it doesn't sense Z and also I have to do this twice because this is a bed Slinger 3D printed a custom mount for the x-axis I'll probably just like tape it to the bed for the y-axis here's a problem I ran into with the input shaper so if you look at the documentation on big tree tack collector manual it'll say oh you've got to set up you know what the MCU is and what the accelerometer is and the bus that it's on and the X Y and Z see how I have Z negative since it's upside down however the thing they left it out they left out is you also have to define the resonance tester now see how I've got two of them X and Y now if I had a core XY printer where the head moved in the XY and the bed only went up and down you would just say Excel chip but in this case you actually have to Define both of them because then if you do auto calibrate axis X or Auto calibrate axis y it won't work because you haven't defined these as X and Y and you also have to put the probe point which is the position on the bed at which it will do the shaking so I've got it on the bed Center obligatory I really like big tree Tech products I've used them on many occasions however their own documentation is usually pretty sparse and you should expect to spend a lot of time on the internet making sure you understand how everything works and for whatever reason every time I search for Clipper stuff I always ended up on Reddit okay I'm gonna go cheaper calibrate axis X oh there it goes it says the frequencies I've left a spool of filament attached to the printer because you know in reality the printer is going to have to deal with that and you know that spool of filament would cause the inertia to change I thought this was going to be a lot more violent oh it's increasing the frequency it's gonna like make the earth crack into like Nikola Tesla okay now because if it finds the resonant frequency of the printer then it can offset the offset that with its movements kind of like noise canceling headphones stop at 133 Hertz I guess it did there's no way we can drill into the core of the Earth but what if we could so for the y-axis I just taped it to the bed what the heck here we go again let's take a look at the input shaping blocks so this was the before times yeah you can see some of the ghosts well I I can see it's not too bad but yeah there's kind of like Echoes that go in that direction I don't really see them on the left hand side and some on the x-axis not as much so the input shaping the x-axis frequency was like uh 75 Hertz and then the y-axis was much lower it was like 23 Hertz probably because it's much heavier so this is after input shaping actually let's see where was now this Extrusion has other issues I think the Extrusion value is incorrect um well we saw that the um the z-axis was incorrect actually yeah you can see a reduction like so yeah hi I'm Billy Mays and you can see what happens when you use OxiClean I I I I hope you can see it I can see it in my human eye the difference oh yeah you can see it here too again it's still it's still in the post one but it's more prevalent in the pre one so yeah input shaping appears to have made a difference now I just need to double check the Extrusion but again since it's a Clipper once I figure out the math I can just type in a number and then hit firmware reset so that's the killer app I think as someone who's done Marlin configurations before the killer app is that you don't have to refresh the firmware you can just do the Clipper Master Splinter I lost the side then 3D print another one I checked the Marlin configuration file for the Maker Gear and I adjusted the Min and Max positions a little bit also I I'm still pretty sure this is over extruding so this is a rotation distance of 31.174 millimeters it's taking the gear ratio into account so we shouldn't have to worry about that in the math if you take 31 point 174 divided by pi that gives us a diameter of 9.9 millimeters that's way too small for our Maker Gear according I checked online it says 10.8 millimeters but I just measured mine and I also double checked my design files my the outer diameter of my two gear is 12 millimeters so if we want to get really pedantic we can take the filament divide by two find the center point plus 12. gives us an actual center point of rotation of 12.875 diameter so we're imagining that the center of the filament is actually the outside of the gear because that's actually what is being rotated we multiply that by pi and we get a fairly different number 40 Point blah blah blah blah blah so let's go in here and uh let's put that number in its place let's do it under yeah well that would explain the overt Extrusion because it's basically assuming it's a nine millimeter diameter when it's actually 12. so it's kind of like when you have a tire on your car that's the wrong size and your speedometer is off same deal so let's try it again at 40.448 and I'll print some parts that are meant to mesh with other parts that I've printed on other printers and we'll see if they're more accurate okay this is with the new settings this red piece was printed on the Maker Gear this was printed on another printer I tried one of these before and it was kind of tight so let's see if this is any better definitely fits better it's a little bit of a little bit of a lump oh that might be that piece of plastic there let's try this gray one here and there's still something pressuring it there I wonder what that is let's compare that to this one yeah that one fits a little tighter what is it whiny kitten oh are you a whiny kitten meow I'm gonna Mark these even though the difference is pretty obvious one two so this is before I adjusted it yeah look at these tines here now I see I just say times on purpose now see just the difference between that and that yeah so before I adjusted the Extrusion it definitely was thicker so I think we're closer I think the Z might need a little adjustment yet because I think it's extruding the right amount because you see it was over extruding before that's why this is thicker than this I'm going to double check the Z math just to make sure it's correct then as a baseline I just printed this on the bamboo X1 that I'm reviewing so you know that thing is like top top flight also a perfect fit the dark gray so yeah I think something's still a little bit off I printed a little Tower here to check the layers looks pretty good the corners are a little iffy I think I probably need to adjust some more settings for that yeah it looks like this corner that's probably where it was doing the layer change probably need to adjust the time per layer the gaps that we saw in the ringing prints or the ringing tests appear to be gone so I think that's probably enough dialing in for this video I'm sure I'll continue to dial it in it looks like I've got my first layer Z maybe a little too squished I was having some trouble the parts not quite sticking so I adjusted the Z Pro offset again flashing the firmware assuming you have a printer that's a known printer that probably is pretty easy the dialing in was was the hard part uh one final note in a prior video I did like a random tear down video and someone in the comments told me what this is this is called an atomic pie so I look I looked it up some more and yeah there are resources for flashiness apparently there was like some sort of like smart home robot that never never came to Market and a bunch of these have been built for that robot so I believe there was a Kickstarter to buy these boards from the inventory and then rename them or repackage them as the atomic pie because it's like it's like a 64-bit Intel atom quad core yeah I mean you could tell it was not actually made for hobbies because this is where the power comes in normally there'd be a barrel Jack the reason I bring this up is because if you had some sort of like x86 uh single board computer like this laying around you could use this to install Clipper you could even use like an old laptop to install Clipper it doesn't have to be a Raspberry Pi or even a Clipper pad even though this video is about the Clipper pad point being like yeah you can install you can install Clipper on any anything you can install Linux on so it doesn't have to necessarily be an unobtainium Raspberry Pi but the nice thing about the Clipper pad is it is obtainium the price is pretty reasonable and it includes a screen and all the hardware is already built in so you know you don't just have this thing stuck on the wall you've got the nice Clipper pad so yeah and then I think I believe it's you can usually have about four instances of clipper on a system so that would be cool because you could have the one pad and then it could be connected like multiple printers that way you're not having to get one pad per printer so yeah Clipper pad it worked out pretty well um the Clipper installation itself while the Clipper was already installed so really it was just about setting up the printer and then dialing it dialing it in so yeah the pad does all that for you and of course if you want to add anything in the future like octoprint or fluid you can just do that with standard Linux commands so yeah I would recommend it it worked out pretty well and now I finally understand what Clipper is all about and I hope you do too

Channel: Ben Heck Hacks

Views: 18,894

Keywords: big tree tech, BTT, pad7, klipper, 3D printer, makergear, anycubic, linux, cats

Id: D0JSJGgU4Xg

Length: 68min 52sec (4132 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023