How to install Klipper for beginners

hey everybody how's it going this is Patrick with stacking lairs today's video is going to be going over how to install Clipper on a brand new system so if you've been looking into Clipper and not too sure what's going on and all the installation is getting confusing for you this is going to be the video for you to get you going okay so first things first we're going to need to go over what equipment do you need to run Clipper I'm going to go over to my uh my phone right now so I can show you what I got going on with for this video there okay so today I'm going to be using the SKR mini E3 version 3. I chose to use this board for this tutorial because you know a lot of people are switching with their Ender threes or Ender model uh printers and this one is designed specifically to fit into an Ender so I figure why not this is going to be one that a lot of people not a lot of newcomers might be coming to so that's that board I'm gonna be using the other thing I'm gonna be using is the big tree Tech BTT Pi big tree Tech pie this is a Raspberry Pi alternative board it's not a clone magic I don't know if you're familiar with Raspberry Pi but if you are you'll notice that it's completely reversed pins are on different sides and things like that but in general it's the same idea um what it is the the important part of what you need um is a Linux system so you need some sort of computer system that can run Linux and that's what this is that's what a Raspberry Pi is you can also if you have an old laptop um this is actually an old laptop but it's running Windows but if you had an old laptop sitting in a drawer that you're not using anymore chances are it's powerful enough to install clip or install Linux on and then you can install Clipper onto that and run on a used old laptop and so you can re you know upcycle your old stuff that you're not using anymore you figure processing power and stuff like that on one of these and even Ram is probably surprisingly low compared to your old computer which you may have you know a four core processor with you know two to four gigs of RAM and that's more than enough to run um Clipper whereas this one has it's a four core processor I can't remember the makers at the top of my head right now but it's only one gigabyte of RAM and it does fine I've never had any issues I got the same style running on um two of my other machines right now so never had an issue so it's definitely capable so if this can run it then an older laptop with more RAM and more processing power can definitely do a great job so anyways enough of that other things you're going to need a USB cable I'm going to be showing you how to install it um with USB uh connection so this is going to be the basic setup there are other ways of doing it you can do it I got this module on here right there which I'm not going to go over here but this is a can bus adapter so you can install um communication through can bus or you can do uart which is another way of plugging in from the gpio pins here these are all of your in-out pins and then you would plug into something I believe is right up in here is your IO pin so that's your being able to control with a different way of connecting without using a USB but that's not what we're doing I'm doing it the easy route quick simple you need some sort of Linux computer system Raspberry Pi or something like this big tree Tech pie you need your microcontroller of course most of the microcontrollers that are in today's printers or any of these type of upgrade boards you can get are going to be compatible with Clipper you need a very good quality SD card to go into your Raspberry Pi or or Pi alternative um unless of course you're using a laptop though you don't need that but I want to point this out because see that here on the down in the lower area you see the little circle with the T on it okay T with a 10. um that's a C10 that's the class and they also have the A1 so those two are classes and those um dictate what kind of speed capabilities the read write speeds and that is important to not go under a C10 or A1 with these cards don't go cheap um get an a reputable brand um I love SanDisk I know other people say they don't like it they don't have good quality but I've never had a sand discount on me um but otherwise a C10 you don't want to go lower to like a C6 or even lower than that if you were using Marlin for instance and you're just loading up STL files are you a nice tail but a G-Code files to print lower quality card is gonna be fine because you're just pushing over the the instructions um but even then I would recommend a higher just because but what this is is more than just loading files this is going to be your entire entire hard drive for your uh your micro computer here so this is going to be your operating system all of your programs and your file storage so you don't want to cheap out and get something you will run into problems if you cheap out so I can't stress that enough don't cheap out on the SD card okay these things are getting pretty cheap as they are so you're not gonna it's not gonna break your bank I think this thing was like uh and I can't remember now but maybe 10 bucks or something like that but um so get those also if you notice I'm not plugged in to the printer at all I have nothing on here um when I upload uh new firmware and stuff like that to to my boards on a brand new board um I don't hook it up to the computer sorry to the printer first because I want to make sure that the firmware is up and running before I start plugging things in and that's kind of what I recommend if you're getting a brand new board let's do this first get everything installed and then you can start plugging in your things to make sure because once you know your firmware is good then the rest should be pretty easy so in doing that since I'm not having my um my power supply from the printer plugged in to power this guy up I'm using the USB as power and to do that you have to put on on this specific board there is the SW USB it's these two top pins that you see I got a little red jumper on you got to jump these two pins because that allows power the 5 volt power through the USB to control and power up the chip so if you don't have that board that that jumper on there um then that's not going to allow any power it's only going to be data and so you won't be able to power up the board unless you have some other alternative power coming in and I do want to point out if you do have an alternative power source your your printer's power source for instance do not have this on because you don't want those connected you don't want two different power sources connected at once uh which is bad news so don't do that um of course you do need a power supply before you make a computer that you're gonna be using your host computer um this one is an official Raspberry Pi um was it a three amp um 5 volt power supply do not use phone chargers I know a lot of people say they use them but they are not designed to power up these things to give a constant clean power so you can run into issues with what's called brownouts or under voltage um to where basically the the charger starts doing things because they are they are battery chargers not power supplies it's a different type of circuitry in there and they're designed to to change voltage a lower voltage and stuff when it starts thinking that it's um charge the battery if so it doesn't overcharge your battery and stuff so there's different circuitry going on dude to stay away from uh battery chargers any of those cell phone chargers things like that don't use them on powering this get an official power supply for it okay so enough of that let's get to the computer and I can show you how to get things going okay so here we are I'm at the Clipper website this is where you should start for anything I recommend go to this clipper3d.org and read as much as you possibly can on this just to get the hang of it um with this video like I said I'm going to be showing you how to install things but I plan to make this a first in a series of clipper videos because I want to really kind of try to Deep dive into all the different features of this stuff um it's not gonna be on this video because I'm gonna try to keep it as simple as I can and my videos get way too long and I know you don't want to hear me drone on about everything so I'm gonna try to break it up but this has all of it um everything you need to know on how to do it and since we're doing it we're going to begin by installing it of course but this is where I start disagreeing with things and I think what's going on here I'll explain to you what my thoughts here are this this website I think is a little bit out of date they haven't gone through and really updated with what what people are using primarily what the tutorials are going on and all those different things um this all this information will work so if you want to skip this video all together and just start reading this and try to follow along it will work but it can get confusing and it can start causing things and issues or you'll find things that don't look anything like what people are showing on their machines if that you know may may have sparked you to come over to Clipper um and one of the big things is for instance it says right here start by installing octopi on your Raspberry Pi I octopi is great but for Clipper I think it's a little over bloated for what it is um Clipper is all about streamlining and having full control over things whereas octopi really can do that but it's so much more that it's all about plug-ins and extra things so if you're running Marlin and you decide you don't want to go to Clipper after seeing this or after going through it's just too much for you and you want to stick with Marlin there I recommend install octopi on your Raspberry Pi and play with that because until I switch to Clipper octopi was a dream I love it and I will still recommend it to anybody using Marlin get octopi it's amazing for Clipper though Clipper has some other things um which I will be showing you one of the main things I'll actually go to my machine that's running right now this is Mainsail now this is something a little bit different appearance it's all blue and it's got the BQ Huracan because that's the printer that it's on so it's a little bit customized layout but this is the main cell user interface and this gives you a lot of information about your your printer it's it's it's your full dashboard it's got as you can see your extruder information your all your motion sensing or not sensing but all your motion information if it's been home to not where the tool head is um you can do your Z offsets all that good stuff you have a console you can set up macros and they all come out here macros will go over in another video but uh you got it all and so when it comes to to what you can do with this machine or sorry with this firmware and how customizable it is you'll start finding that you don't really need the octoprint stuff anymore everything is ready to go here and if you can't get it immediately there's somebody that's already made a macro or some sort of add-on that you can put into this and work um so yeah that's that so let's get into installing all right so as you can see here there's all this stuff about installing octopi I'm saying forget this don't do it it's not worth it so this is how I recommend installing if you have a Raspberry Pi this is going to be really easy for you Raspberry Pi because like I said is so well developed with the the community they have things already set up ready to go the first thing you're going to need to do and this is going to be for both the Raspberry Pi or um the pie big tree Tech pie is you're going to want to come and download the Raspberry Pi imager software this is going to be a software that we use to install or to burn an image onto the SD card it's going to be burning the operating system onto the SD card um and it's simple as you see it's a free download I don't know did it say free it is free it's a free download um really great and easy to use it's just here raspberry pi.com and software this is Raspberry Pi's official Imaging program so it's not some kind of weird third-party thing that's going to make you sign up for stuff no ads and all that good stuff um so once you get that installed you're going to want to open it up and first thing I'm going to do is show you with if you're a Raspberry Pi owner make it really easy so here it is I got the imager opened up um so for Raspberry Pi like I said this is super simple you let's go back you hit here to choose the operating system this is going to be the operating system you're going to burn onto the SD card if in the future you decide you don't want Clipper or you decide in this that you don't want Clipper you can just install the Raspberry Pi operating system and this will give you a basically desktop a whole Linux desktop experience that you can use on your Raspberry Pi but because we're doing 3D printing I want you to scroll down to this first Square guy that says other specific purpose OS click in there then you got the first option here um it should be the first option on yours if not it's in here but 3D printing so it's going to be starting to get exciting here and then you have all these 3D printing uh operating systems they're 3D printing geared operating system so as you can see you have octopi this is going to be the one if you want to use it with Marlin firmware this is just a clean octopi setup without any Clipper stuff involved so that's what you would use like I said for Marlin but we are doing Clipper so you have these two options this is the octopi Clipper so if you do want to try octopi and Clipper you can install that version I don't recommend it no disrespect to the developer because they do a fantastic job and I recommend it but not for Clipper I recommend this one Mainsail OS main cell OS is going to be um pretty much what you're going to see on most people's um videos or or pictures and stuff when they're showing their their printer and how things are set up and you know with messages and all that stuff that's mainly I want to say good 90 of what they're using is Mainsail so it's very well developed a lot of people using it so that means lots of uh answers if you have questions so you click on that so now you're set to have Mainsail installed now you need to choose what storage device you're going to install it on so I'm going to here put my SD card I'm here wiping out my SD card this is already set up but I'm going to go ahead and do a fresh install so you can see how to do this so once you have your SD installed in there you want to get let's see let's get rid of these first now because I already have like I said the operating system installed on here it's telling me things like this in this whole process I want to point out if you see this here pop up format disk before you can use it all that don't do it do not do it this is Windows saying hey there's some sort of uh file system on this disk that you just entered and I don't know how to read it so you need to format it if you want to use this as a as a storage disk well we're not using a storage disk we're using it as a computer hard drive so ignore this do not format no no no hit cancel ignore All These Warnings yes I know it's not going to work and just move on okay that will also happen later on when we're doing this Burning process it will pop up again and it if you click format while that's happening you're going to ruin this process so do not format while this is going on we don't need to do that it's a Windows warning that's all I can't stress that enough don't format so here we go so with one nice thing about the Raspberry Pi imager is that it most of the time will only show you a drive that you can use it's not going to show you your main drive but just in case if you happen to see it says mounted as like C drive or some other format where you know like for instance if it's C drive that's more than likely that's your your hard drive on your computer do not select that because it will automatically format and overwrite and kill your computer basically but Raspberry Pi has done a really good job to not show you that not even give you an option to show you that so um my recommendation is if you have other things like external hard drives and stuff plugged into your computer unplug those unless you need them and have only the the dry that you want to burn your image to install that way you don't accidentally burn to the wrong one anyways make sure you're on the right one click that storage and again with Raspberry Pi this is unique to raspberry pipes and will not work with the big tree Tech or other non-rasberry Pi boards um you click on here this little gear emblem and oops and that will bring up this Advanced options and this is going to be where you want to enable SSH you also probably want to set up a hostname hostname is is basically what the the host computer is going to be named so when it sees it comes up as um you know like here it'll say Raspberry Pi local and stuff like that you can name it to whatever you want if you want to name it George go ahead um but uh just remember what you name it because um a lot of times you can use this the Raspberry Pi dot local or whatever you name it dot local up in here to access the SSH or to access your your system if you can't find your IP address um not all computers I can't remember exactly what it is you need to get that going but not all computers let that work but it's good to have it and to know that way you can possibly all right get that going without using an IP address otherwise you will need an IP address because um that's how we get in but we'll get over that in another or go over that later next thing you need to do is set up a user name and password because we're going to be using SSH this is getting the um it's a secured shell um thing what it is it enables you to use another computer like what we're going to be doing here using the Windows computer to talk to or literally go in and use the Raspberry Pi computer to control it via the Windows computer it may sound confusing but it sounds more confusing than it is you just have to make sure SSH is enabled so you set up the password here and that's what you would use as your username and password to get in you also want to configure your Lan system your wireless system so you put in your SSA ID which is the Wi-Fi's name that you connect to it is case sensitive so make sure to write it in as exactly how it is same thing with your password of course case sensitive to your password for your Wi-Fi and these are you know your password that actually you use to connect to your Wi-Fi not you're not making up a new password um it's also recommended to put in your your country for here your you know where your wireless is located these are just going to help things run smoother and you know get things like time correct and all those various things um also I recommend setting up your Locale same thing put it to your local time zone and and where you are this is just going to make sure that your keyboard is correct if you have a different country keyboard I have a keyboard that's Norwegian um or I guess the Nordic keyboard so it's got other symbols that if I have a US keyboard here things don't work because they're in the wrong spots so make sure you do that so things work when you type um and it's always good to have your time zone set up too because that will you know time stamp log files and stuff so for future problem solving you want to be able to know what time things happened and the rest is up to you if you want to do that you can normally I think play sound is unchecked but you can check it if you want to that's just to let you know that it's done if you're out because this part once we go further or to the next step here it will take a long time to do so when you're done with that you click save and then you close out and then we can write now with the Raspberry Pi you click right and you follow through but because like I said I'm not using a Raspberry Pi I'm going to show you the next step or I should say the alternative step to where if you're using a non-raspberry pi how are you going to do that and it's more or less the same there's just a couple differences here so of course we're not going to use a Raspberry Pi these are all designed all these pre-installed ones here are designed for Raspberry Pi not designed for other things there's different chips um that these computers have so you have to have something that's designed for that chip so we go back to the beginning and then we have the option at the very bottom here which is use custom and so this is basically using a custom image from your computer so this is whatever file the Raspberry Pi again is great to give you this option that you don't even have to have a Raspberry Pi but they will still burn an image for you to use so use custom now to get this one I already have it here so I'm not going to download it again but um of course you need to download that and victorytech of course has their own system for for their um their Pi alternative and it is here at the baker Tech CB1 releases the CB1 is their first um Raspberry Pi alternative style this is an equivalent to a cm4 Raspberry Pi which is a compute module so the board that I showed you at the beginning of this video is all in one whereas the CB1 is let's see is this guy here so you have your computer board and then that clicks in to another board that has all the input output peripherals so this has no input output this is all just the computing power so this is kind of like your motherboard and then this is all of your computer cases the easiest way to look at it this is the motherboard in all of your video and RAM and processor and all that and this is just your USB and internet and power stuff but with the new one it is the CB1 and the Victory Tech Pi use the same chip the h616 so it's the same operating system that they've made for it and it it is Linux it's running uh Debian 11 I believe it is Debian 11 Linux so yeah that'd be an 11. here it is which is a very um commonly used uh distribution of Linux so there are two options you have the Debian 11 Clipper kernel and then you have the minimal kernel minimal kernel is going to be something if you are not going to be installing Clipper and you want to just use this as a Debian computer you can go ahead and do that but since we're doing Clipper that's the one you're going to want to download is this this one right here um the other one on top here this sha is oops get out of that the SSA is a um basically it's just a text file that's showing the number that will come up if you do an essay sha um what do they call it a hash or a checksum to see it's just a basically way to confirm that you downloaded the right file so it's not needed it is recommended to do from downloading when you download something like this because if you had one bit downloaded wrong then it can actually mess up your computer or not mess up your computer but mess up your image I'm not even recording here yeah okay I had to double check I was recording my time went away um but it can mess up your uh image when you burn it and so if you have one bit wrong things might not work right so it is a good idea to check it I'm not going to go over this video but there's lots of tutorials um on how to use um the built-in Windows has it built-in you can generate an sha file and and yeah show that and then compare it to the number that you got there if the numbers match you're good um one thing if if you do that this here the X Z that is a zipped file so you first have to unzip it and then check that unzipped image against that number because if you check the zipped file it will produce a different number anyways that's going a little bit too far but I just want to point that out so download this for if you're using the victory Tech pie or get your Raspberry Pi set up now let's get back to the Raspberry Pi imager so like I said I'm using this image open that up and as you can see it's there there now in there now I'm using this card that's already in there and with this one like I said you can't do the thing I mean you can you can open this up and put all this stuff but it's not going to do that because it's a different file system so it's not even going to do anything here um so I just leave that alone you don't need to do this if you have the a non-rasberry pie thing so once you get those things selected hit right and it's going to tell you it's going to delete everything are you sure that's the correct one yes it is and then you're gonna have to wait this depending on your computer speed and of course your card speed like I mentioned if you don't have a fast card it's going to take even longer but this is going to write everything to the card and then it's going to verify it and it will take a long time um I want to say upwards of 10 minutes maybe maybe even more I can't remember exactly how long um I guess I could look at the time now what is it 9 56 see what it is when it gets back but I'm not gonna make you sit through this of course um I'm going to fast forward through it but uh I want to say probably this is a great time to mention something new for my channel I do have a sponsor and this video is sponsored by PCB way so if you can sit through it while you're writing your file and do a quick little watch through I'll have My Little My First video I don't know how to do this advertisement stuff but yeah I am now sponsored and I want to say a big thank you to PCB way so let's check them out here if you're someone who loves tinkering designing and creating you'll definitely want to check out PCB way PCB way isn't just about PCB manufacturing they've got a wide range of services to cater to creators just like you from crafting intricate prototypes using many forms of 3D printing to precision machine parts through CNC Machining and so much more PCB way has got you covered a really nice part is their online quoting system it lets you see the cost estimates for the services you need allowing you to plan your projects without any surprises as for Quality PCB way takes it seriously across all their services and do their best to ensure all your designs will meet the highest standards Beyond Services PCB way offers a supportive Community their forums and dedicated support team are there to help you to navigate through your creative Journey if you're intrigued and want to know more about PCB Waste Services and how it can benefit your projects check out the link in the description I want to give a big thanks to PCB way for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to the video okay so here we are with the message showing that things are done and we can now remove our car from the reader and go ahead and hit continue now surprisingly I didn't get the message that pops up but I want to show you I'm just going to remove the card and put it back in um since I do actually need to do one extra step with the victory Tech pie so put it back in and you may get like I was mentioning earlier this format disk thing pop up um some point during the the um doing the flashing or right at the end when it's done if your computer tries to reread the card after it's done flashing this will happen so this is the part I want to stress to you do not format the disk this is only popping up because Windows does not know how to read the Linux file system directly so it's basically assuming that there's some kind of corrupted data on there or something like that so say hey if you want to use it for storage which it's a storage card so it's saying if you want me to use it as storage you're going to have to format it but cancel that out ignore All These Warnings don't do it it's not a problem it's it's nothing wrong with the the burn you did good okay that that's basically letting you know that Linux is now on that card not a Windows system um that being said with let's get this away too with the big tree Tech system you you do end with Linux systems in general you will have a small drive a boot Drive um that is normally um I can't remember the file system right now I think it's it's like that 32. um so I will have some boot up information and things that you can edit on a regular computer um to kind of do some preliminary stuff and that's what we're going to be doing here so there's two files that you want to pay attention to is this one board environment or board env.txt and the system config file for this one we're going to use the system config file because this is where um you know it's a little gear it's basically this is the same kind of file that would get edited on the Raspberry Pi um actually here I'm not going to open it up in that program let's close this out okay so to open up these if you notice it's not normal it's a doc CFG so Windows can't natively open that either um so you're going to need to download another program if you don't already have it it's called Notepad plus plus it is a free program here I'll actually show you the website so you can see what it is that's 80 plus plus if you do not pad plus plus and it's gonna be the first one um you can download and it's this one with this lizard on a pencil um this is a great um program to have on your computer because this allows you to edit code and write code and all sorts of stuff without messing up the format if you use your in your built-in notepad program on Windows there's a chance that it's going to actually reformat the the coding you won't see a visual difference but it actually adds things um to the ends of lines it'll actually like make new line symbols in the code of the file which will ruin it for Linux so it don't don't use your regular notepad program get this notepad plus plus it's the easiest it's free it's safe it's used globally for for editing stuff like this so go ahead and download that and that's what I'm going to open up this file in so once you have it downloaded you can just right click and then you should have here edit with notepad plus plus so open it up and as you can see it's a pretty simple um just a clean looks like a notepad program but it's a little bit more involved because you got all sorts of um you know you can check your languages all sorts of uh coding languages that you have um you know C plus plus and so on probably pythons in there yeah so you got all these different programming languages that it knows how to read and it'll actually help you out with information this is just a standard config file so it's not going to really be that big of a deal but anyways the reason we need to get in here is because we need to do these lines right here we need to enter in um your SSID and password so same thing like I said on on using this gear thing only here we're doing it through this configuration file so I'm going to put in my Wi-Fi and password so I can get it to connect hopefully I will type that incorrectly um and then you also want to do this line here this is going to be your time zone default as you can see is um for Beijing time so you don't really if unless you're there you don't want to do that so you on you delete that little hash mark and go back so you see the little pound sign the hash mark get rid of that that's comments anytime you see these little hash marks though that means it's a comment so it won't be read by the program um so take that away and then you want to put in your um your time zone and if you don't know how to find that there it does have to have a specific one if you use go ahead and copy this line right here it's the the time data control and then the list time zones so you copy that and go to your browser paste that in and it'll bring you to the first thing or at least it should um it's the the giant Geist GitHub Geist um and then the online display of that list and so this is going to list all the different available um country and city things that you can use so you find your city country and city or the closest to you to get that that thing so if you're interested if you're if you're in Los Angeles you would use this America slash Los Angeles and so on okay uh for me I'm in let's do a fine town here I'm in Europe uh and then Oslo I think is what it is yeah you got your Oslo and then you just go ahead let's go back to that file and put that in between the quotes the quotes do stay on these so you're a boss of that that's going to put me into this local time zone also make sure you're on your SSID and your password leave the quotes you do need to leave those there um so yeah the rest of it is is other stuff if you have different type of um Wi-Fi things or if you have different um screens and things like that you're using you can also change your host name if you want to um you can take that out and then change this to whatever you want um but I'm just going to leave it to just to the stock CB1 so save that file so make sure click the icon or control s save the I that file and close it out the other file I don't think there's anything we need to enter in right now but this gives you some other options in this board environment same thing open it with notepad plus plus even though it is a text file still do the notepad plus plus um yeah we don't really need to do much with this um but this is if you in the future you start doing things like adxl um sensors and can bus modules and things like that these are to allow different different peripherals to be um activated so for instance you see here it says the IR there's this big tree Tech pie board has an IR sensor on it so if you want to use that you uncomment that to you to activate that sensor so anyways not important for this tutorial but just wanted to point out those are the two files that you would edit to add or to change features so let's close that out we're good with that nothing else here needs to be changed so make sure to eject your card it's always good to eject don't just pull it out because especially with these systems again this is your operating system you don't want to mess up a single bit down here otherwise things will get corrupted always shut down and eject before removing cards so we got that pull it out put it into your your board okay so here it is I got it powered up plugged in I got the SD card in there and it's powered now with this one it also has a jumper just like the other board for using a USBC power because it does have an option of uh power supply like uh that's the same power supply that you would be hooking this board up you can share with this one it's a 12 volt 24 volt um but just point that out on the Raspberry Pi you don't need to worry about the jumper because this is the only way you can power it and um yeah so your first boot especially with these um I think it's the same on the Raspberry Pi the first boot is going to take a little while because what it's going to do is put all of those configuration um setups the Wi-Fi and any other things you've added it's going to um put that into the main part of the programming system and configure everything for you so the first boot can take a while it takes a few minutes or so um give it if it takes if it's anything more than 10 minutes and it's still not connecting to Wi-Fi then go back and check your Wi-Fi password make sure you got everything entered right because it should not take that long but anyways so now we got this board up and running um and I can show you here on the screen so like I said there was the um that that dot local so for Raspberry Pi you would have Raspberry Pi dot local um putting that in worked I didn't need to get my IP address but if this doesn't work then you will have to get to your router and get your IP address both are fine IP address is actually a good number to have anyways because um sometimes getting into other things like SSH and stuff you have to use IP address you can't just use this but it should work if it worked here it should work everywhere else but as you can see we're in but we do have errors mainly because as you see over here I'm not plugged in so of course it's got errors you can't see anything nothing's working um we're going to go over these errors and show you what's going on but before we do that there's another step we need to do we need to make the firmware so that this computer can talk to this Lin a clip around here is the program but it needs the Clipper firmware to know how to talk to each other so that's what we're going to do now so this is where the SSH comes in um actually I probably should have stayed at the beginning there's one more program to download and that is a program called putty if you don't have that so you use putty and this is a it's a completely free system um it's for emulating the terminal and stuff like that it's it's what you would use to get in and basically control other computers from um like a Windows computer or your host computer so we're gonna use that again it's a free open sourced um it's no ads it's not invasive or anything like that and I use this to actually even Network on a daily basis so it's a very good um a very good program to have and it's very small and easy to use so don't let it fool you or discourage you when you see when you open it up it may look a little bit involved but for what we're using it for it's pretty easy so I have it already installed here of course and when you first open it up it's going to look like this and then you're going to have your hostname or IP address now I'm gonna actually see if the if it works so this was a BTT and I know CB1 all caps on this one and it was dot local see if this works if not I'm going to get the IP address so you put in your IP address like it shows or your host name and click open and if you see this message um go ahead and hit accept if this is the very very first time you may not see that um but this is basically saying that the um that SSH sha footprint doesn't match what this program has seen before so it thinks that maybe someone has gone through and messed with your you know your system and swapped SD cards for instance it's like hey are you sure this is this is right did you do this so yeah just accept if it is if you haven't done anything new and you come and get into putty some other day and you haven't updated or did any type of New Image you might want to be suspicious but first thing that is normal so as you see it's giving me a login so this be um this dot local did work on that so for the big tree Tech pie or the cv1 they have a default password and username username is BQ the IQ you enter and then the password is also be IQ you so that's your username and password and it does show you if you go to their thing this is right here the SSH is what we're doing and then there's your login bqbq so all the informations here that I've been talking about also if you need to re-reference that is the github.com victorytech forward slash cv1 this has all the information I've been talking about let's go back over to there so as you can see I'm now in and this is the operating system running on the the Raspberry Pi on onto the host computer right now and so now I'm talking to that and you can do all sorts of stuff if you're familiar with Linux you're good to go if not um you have commands like LS that's going to be the list what's in your current directory where you're sitting so as you can see with this file that we downloaded everything's already installed you have Clipper Clipper screen your main cell all your configurations everything that you need to go so that's this is where I'm telling you it's really easy to do um if you use the pre-configured setups it's going to be super easy and there's not much you need to really worry about but there are some things to continue going on so once you get to this screen you're going to want to do an update um the update is very important because um this image that was that was made that they downloaded is is a I think it was made in March and there's been a lot of bug fixes and things that have gone on since they made this image so you're going to want to update to all the new stuff so you can do it on this screen but if we go back to the browser and you'll see I had already signed in if you come down you sign into your thing this is their main sale so now we're talking to the Mainsail user interface on that machine so you come down here where it says machine and scroll down don't worry about these errors because it's not set up yet but you come down here and you see all these question marks so right now it's saying that all the pre-installed stuff isn't matching it doesn't know what it is it's not matching so you're going to want to check for updates here and you definitely want to do this before you move on you want to get your system updated because if you don't it can cause problems this part can take a while again so I'll fast forward through this okay now you can see how everything went blue with updates so like I mentioned everything's been updated so it's it's very important to get this going on um I recommend doing it in two stages because I don't know which order it actually picks but just to be sure I recommend doing the system update first this is going to update here I'll hover over here as you can see all locked there are 89 packages that are going to be upgraded so that's a lot going on um and this is all of your Linux stuff this is all the background stuff that all the rest of these things are going to be running on top of so I I don't think it's necessary but I always like to do that one first just to make sure that um you know you get you get the newest of whatever operating system you have um up and running that way any type of bugs that have gone on there there was a pretty big bug not that long ago that um made it very difficult to near impossible for new people to use the USB plug on their machines because it would stop reading the serial port for some reason um a lot of the Debian distributions were affected by that so you know updating and make sure that you don't have that problem so yeah just just bear with the system do the updates it does take a while but once you're done with that you're gonna have a clean running system and in general it doesn't take a dramatically long time okay we got that one done once you see it says package update finished foreign and then after that you can do go ahead and do the update all now when you do this keep in mind that there is a chance that it will shut down or lose connection or things like that don't be alarmed it is normal okay like I said you can get these connection failed messages but don't worry it's still running in the background it's just the network between main cell and Moonraker Moonraker is oh let's see if I can get this right uh Moonraker is what basically sets up like your little Network system to talk to Mainsail between main cell and your printer Mainsail is the user interface that you're here uh yeah not really that important but there are these three things you have Mainsail Moonraker and Clipper they all work together as you can see here um so during the updating of Moonraker it has a shutdown and that's why you lose connection so you just hit try again and it should connect again and there you go as you can see updating full done everything is good um yeah nothing really you need to worry about inside here but um if you want you can go through and read everything that's gone on um there was one part that mentioned about pip which is the python installer um thing um so like when you when you install plugins stuff like that you use pip and um I did mention somewhere down the line it's not it's not really important that it but there's a newer version it's just kind of letting you know hey there's a new version of it available and it'll tell you the command to use um to install it but we're not gonna do that it's not necessary but you can read through that and it'll do it so there it goes and it reboots and again we're met with his error so a lot of people get hung up here because they install it they're finally like yes I got everything installed but then they see an error like oh what's going on how do I fix this error what is this big tree Tech XXX and all that different stuff um so I'll show you really quick just so you know why that this error and this include file is there what big tree Tech has done with their system is they've basically just put in a blank printer configuration they've set up all the all the different configuration files that you must have to start with basically I mean there's some extra stuff in here but um the printer config is a printer.com CFG that is your primary file that tells Clipper how to interact with everything this is where you configure all of your printer configurations all the settings and like Motors and what how many access it's going to have and what speeds and all that good stuff and I will show you that a little bit now as you can see right now it's empty but it has the include main cell which you do have to have so this this part up here is needed this is telling the printer configuration to launch main cell which is what we're looking at now um and use main cells stuff but then it also has this this is what that first error is about that it's it has this include generic config well there is no what this is saying is include this file this file does not exist right now we haven't installed that this is just putting a placeholder to let you know that you can use include and your your boards your generic board config pre-configuration which I'm going to show you I think it's here yeah we're on the SKR mini E3 right so if you come to that victorytech forward slash Victory Tech SKR mini E3 tree master yada yada you come into the GitHub I'll put these links down in the description too if you want to to do that use that but anyways you come to the firmware and then to the board there's all the different the version one two and so on version three is what we have here and then you go to clipper and you have this right here SKR mini e3v3 Clipper dot config this is basically a pre a generic here we'll just go inside so you can see it this is generic printer.config file all set up with all the PIN numbers and everything so you don't need to go through and discover all your PIN numbers and set all this up that it has the bulk of it as a generic file set up and because that this is the uh this is specifically designed for the Ender 3. it looks like it has like the proper run currents and everything for the board already so it's more or less set up ready to go um for for an Ender three from from what it looks like here um so what you'll do is you come to these squares hit that copy the raw file this does that basically copies all that's in this file here and then you come back to your project config and you can actually get rid of this so you can delete that and then leave that that number one line there and then underneath that paste in all that information and you're set with that um there's still more we're not ready to go yet because we do like I said have to flash the firmware but I just wanted to point that out a lot of people get hung up on that so if you've already flashed firmware and you're still having that issue you're not understanding that's probably what's going on if you're using the victory Tech stuff um so yeah so let's get the firmware installed I'll just save and close this for now because it's not going to really need anything um actually if I do a restart you should see that that will go away you'll get a new warning let's restart clipper this is gonna restart the thing and look over the re-refresh the printer configuration so now you see it's trying to start up but it's not ready so it's just kind of waiting is trying to start and talk to the board and it's waiting for the board to say here I am and you know do the handshake between the two systems so I can start talking but after a while it'll get another message talking about the MCU of course we haven't installed the firmware and it's not plugged in or powered up so it's not there so let's do that back to your putty and into your SSH so to make firmware what we're going to do is use a tool called make and that is yeah it's too much to explain but basically we're going to use it to make the firmware for it so we're gonna need to get into our Clipper folder directory so you to do that you do CD that means change directory and then we're doing this file uh this folder right here and that is uh Clipper and normally with Linux you can hit the tab after you do the first couple letters you hit Tab and it'll start Auto filling in so if this was the only Clipper then it would just write it out but we have Clipper and you also have clippy so that's why I stopped at the pp um but then you just do the next ER and press tab again and it'll go if you do a capital K I'll show you these are just tricks to help you think get things faster you do a capital K tab that's the only one in this whole file this whole directory here that has its capital K so it automatically put it in but anyways just a trick in case you didn't know that so we're gonna do a Clipper oops and then enter and now we're in that directory we can do LS just so you can see that we're in a different directory now um and then to make your firmware the command is make I make a eat and then um or whatever what is it it is a menu config menu config if I remember right make menuconfig make space and menu config all one word and hit enter and it's going to launch into this so this is your your firmware configuration um yeah a little application that's running so this is where you're going to select all your information now there's stuff that's already filled out on this one I think it's because it was originally used as a [Music] basically what they did is they beat your Tech made their firmware and what they used or not from where their their operating system and then they just cloned it so you can use it they've erased all of the their information and then just cloned it so now we have it so certain things are going to be already filled out but you may not get any of this it actually may look like that when you open it up with with nothing in here so let's let's just try to get it so it looks it may look like something like this very very basic um so the first thing to do is the first line is to enable the actual low level configuration stuff and that'll as you see populates more information then you want to choose your microcontroller um with this specific one which is the for the SKR mini it's using a stm32 board so you want to find that that's one right here the STM microelectronics stm32 I'm using spacebar or actually I'm using the the right key but you can use spacebar to select or you can use left and right right selects it and then left goes back um so yeah you can use space or that um and then using up and down arrows you can't use your mouse on the screen next you're going to want to choose your your processor model again it may be all the way up at the Top If if you haven't used this or if it's the first time opening up but this is actually surprisingly on the right chip for this um it's the uh that one right there the Geo B1 and to get this information I will point that out if you're using for instance the big tree Tech boards here there's that MCU unable to connect error so that's a good sign that's saying that it knows the printer configuration is good it's just you know trying to find trying to talk to the board it can't anyways so to get your information for the board a lot of the generic uh configuration files that you can find will have this portion in the top and as you can see it's telling you to be compiled for that board uh sorry that chip there and then with this type of a bootloader and then it's using USB Communications or uart and whatnot and so it's telling you how to do it the make flash and stuff and all that good stuff um as you can see with this one it's special it doesn't work with make flash command which boy I'm jumping all over the place but just just to point out why that's saying that when you're in here with the Clipper and how to use or how to install it starts giving you this information to use there's there it is that make flash this won't work because the specific board doesn't work that way and it doesn't really describe too much about that um because they're assuming that you're using I don't know they're assuming if you're using certain boards or some boards work some boards don't it's just it's kind of weird that's why I say steer away from this page and just follow along with these other tutorials anyways so if you come to the specific board that you're using go to their um clipper firmware page and you'll get all their information that you need and what you need to do to set up so here it is this is the the microcontroller building stuff and they have a picture of what it looks like it can be a little bit different because again this is out of date but the basics of what you need to put are here and so there you go we have the g0b1 you have the a kilobyte bootloader what kind of Crystal you need to to put in there and all that good stuff so all the information is there and of course if you can't find this jump onto the different forums and ask and one of us or somebody out there is going to have the information to give you pretty quickly um and so yeah that's what we're setting it up as and again we're using a USB one other thing before we jump off this page you see that there's already pre-compiled firmware I I say do not use these um they may work but these things as you can see here that it was used in the commit from October of 22. so that's pretty old even if it was just a few months ago it's still old don't use them because it may not even properly talk to the newer Clipper anymore um so that's why we're making it fresh always make it fresh on a new system okay update then make so let's get back to our screen here so this one says no bootloader but we do need a loader it's the eight kilobyte there kilobit kilobyte um and then we're using a board that has an eight megahertz Crystal this is important to get the right megahertz Crystal because that is what um deals with the timing of the chip so as it's doing all its computer stuff it's going to be you know counting in a certain frequency basically and if you use the wrong chip or wrong Crystal designation time is gonna be all wrong things won't work right next up is your communication interface like I said we're going to be using USB but these are where this is the area you would change things you want to do can bus or uart mode um depending on what kind of board you're using um so yeah we're just keeping it on the first one there which is the standard USB um the rest you don't need to worry about so USB IDs and gpio opens um this last one here is if you want to set a certain pin high but don't mess with that right now because that's a little bit more advanced and you have to do some other things to get that going so just leave that blank The Next Step will be hitting Q if you look down here at the bottom it says quit Q for quick prompt save so you just literally hit the letter q and it's going to tell you do you want to save it if you haven't changed anything on here if you're just going to make a new firmware but all this information is the same when you hit quit it may not ask you this so just so you're aware of that but if you've changed something that's going to make a new one then you hit yes and it's ready to go but what it has has done right now is just save that configuration of the firmware so now we have to actually make it and it's very simple all you do is say make m-a-k-e and enter now it's going to go through and actually make compile make all the firmware that goes onto your board so that's gonna take a little bit this part doesn't really take a huge amount of time but I will Fast Forward okay so once you get back to your prompt here where you can start typing things again it's all done and then this is the next step what we need to do is get this file which is the the clipper.bin when you get that file off of the Raspberry Pi or whatever host computer you're using and onto an SD card because this is the the file that we're going to use to that that is the firmware um so the way I do it I use another program which you may want to download if you don't use um you can use command prompts through here and copy and move it over to it I don't want to go through the whole server stuff and do that I find it easiest to just use a program called um win SCP and again I'll put links to all these different programs that I use to make it easy for you to find but this when SCP is a really great system because what it does is allow you to get into uh let's see let's do a new one it allows you to get into the um uh to the host computer and it basically just copy paste between your Windows system and your host computer that you're talking to so as you can see it looks a lot like the putty setup um but it's yeah it's a little bit more involved with so it's pretty nice I'll show you here so let's see I can do the hostname I think again so PTT I really want to put pie I did CB1 on this one I probably should have changed it to Pi cb1.local I think that should work let's see put in the username and password b-i-q-u and b i q u again and I'm going to save I'm going to save the passwords just to have it easy it's not recommended but I'm going to end up erasing this and doing something else with it anyway so no big deal and then you log in and if it worked right yep so the same thing you get that message it's like hey wait a minute uh that I've seen this computer before it's not matching up just hit yes and there we are now we are in the filing system of that computer and uh now I can come in and copy paste and so when you did this make as you can see right in here it's saying this out all over the place out out that made a new file or a new um directory inside your Clipper directory so you go into there Clipper and there it is out and here is your clipper.bin that's the file that we need this is the firmware so you're going to do copy and then paste it somewhere um let's see where do I want to paste this so I could just I'm just going to paste it on my desktop just because um actually you know what I'm going to put the SD card and we'll just paste it direct to the SD card you do need an SD card you can use the same one but obviously as you can see I'm I'm on that computer so I'm not going to be able to use that one but um here I have another one I'm using and uh I'm just going to drag that actually into this so let's get that out of there shrink this up a little so we can see what's going on there okay so like I said I need this file so I can just click and hold and drag it over to my SD card and that was the wrong wrong spot let's try that one more time into the SD card there we go these are should be in there some some place there it is so there's your Clipper firmware and one more thing that's special for the big tree Tech stuff you need to rename this to Firmware so you just type in firmware and that's it one thing I want to mention if you noticed I only typed firmware and the dot bin was already there it's sometimes your system will not show the dot bin part it'll just say firmware and so every all the tutorials and stuff are all over the place that says it needs to be named firmware.bin so you type in firmware.bin assuming that's what it needs to be named well what will happen is if you don't see this dot bin and you actually type that bin it'll add one more dot bin at the end so it'll be firmware.bin.bin and that's not going to work it's a big um it's a very common thing that happens um and I think I can't remember exactly what it is but there's an option I think especially with Windows 11 now it's it's like default where it hides extensions um maybe it's in the properties here I'm not gonna dig too much but um no I'm not gonna view possibly uh let's see hidden checkbox file name extensions right here so if that's not checked as you can see where did the file go it says firmware without being still here but it'll it'll hide a lot of other things like you see system it doesn't have the dot CFG anymore so if you don't see dot bin you think I have to type it in just don't all you need to do is type in the word firmware and you're you're good to go don't don't type the dot bin even if it's not there just don't type it it is a DOT bin file as you can see underneath here it's a bin file so it'll automatically add that to it so I just want to point that out because that's been a big problem with people trying to flash firmware and it just won't flash that's more than likely what's going on it's not that anything's wrong with with your system or your SD card which a lot of people say oh you need a free format you need to do this your system's bad all it is is because you typed in dot bin and now it's doubled up so keep that in mind if you're having that problem so anyways now that we have that firmware dot been named properly do not capitalize do not add anything else because big tree Tech boards aren't going to read it otherwise so again let's eject that SD card and let's see hopefully this works because this is a boot Drive I think it should uh where am I eject all right so you have to remove pull it out put your SD card in and then we power up the board I don't need to film that you know how powering things up looks I guess I'll show it okay SD card is in powered up remember with this jumper here because I'm powering it via USB and the USB I'm just using the power direct from here so pretty straightforward again nothing connected to the printer everything is just straight on from the board all right and normally when you power this up with the SD card the firmware is not going to take much time it's a tiny file um at like 28 kilobytes and so I mean it it's immediate as soon as it's powered up it's flashed and so as long as you have your lights on and everything are fine it's more than likely done that's not going to give you any confirmation that it happened unfortunately and that's just the way it works um the only way you'll know is by going into this next step here and seeing that you can communicate to it so leave this powered up and on and we'll go to the next step all right so now that you got that put on you can close this program out you don't need that anymore let's get back to our putty system here and the first thing you can do is LS USB all one word and this is going to check what is plugged onto the USB and what you're looking for is something like this right here that's letting me know that at the very least um the Linux computer or your Raspberry Pi or whatever it is can see the um the controller board so it does know that it's attached to that so that's the good that's a good thing you already have that step taken care of The Next Step you want to do is get the serial number of this system and make sure that it's actually a clipper firmware that's running and to do that the command is LS and then you want to do forward slash Dev forward slash serial forward slash uh what is that buy ID if I remember right one more time and then you want to put a star and the star is basically just saying find anything that matches the rest of this so it's going to match this first part and then anything else and it should only be that one thing on this board so you hit enter and there it goes it popped up and found it if you have this you're good to go this means the firmware flashed and you're ready and this actually you do need to copy so go ahead and highlight it and then with when you're running putty to copy um you hold shift control and then C if you hold if you do just Ctrl C it's going to create this little thing and it may not actually copy that's basically to cancel whatever's running so shift Ctrl C to do the copy and then you're going to want to come back to where you have your error right so now we can't it can't see the board still even though you're plugged in but the reason why is because it doesn't know that serial number so you come into your printer config where we had pasted in all that information and you scroll down until you find where do they put it my next videos are going to be more about organizing this type of stuff to make things easier to find but here you go MCU is what you're looking for the MCU and then we're in a Serial because we're using the serial communication which is the USB and then there's that whole thing now you see there's something already here that's just a generic one that's not going to be the same what you want to do is like I said copy that and paste that in hopefully I copied it properly and paste it in there we go I don't know if you notice but the numbers here changed so this is this is a unique number to the chip so now it should know let's just clean that up it should know how to talk to that specific chip that we're connected to and you hit save and reset and it should it'll probably give us another error because we don't have any um yeah so we have this error we don't have any temperature sensors installed so right now it's saying the MCU is shut down that's saying that the controller board has automatically shut down it went into basically a thermal runaways type of situation because the analog to digital converter that's what ADC is is out of range so that's letting you know that basically this generally occurs when your maximum minimum is not configured correctly um or it exceeds the configured temps and because there's nothing plugged in a full open circuit is going to be like minus 100 degrees or something like that which obviously can't be happening so that's one of its ways of saying oh sensor is not reading properly I'm shutting down to you know to avoid a fire basically so right now all I'm going to do is just modify so you can see what it would look like but at this point your system is set up ready to go all the rest is all configurations inside here and like I said I'm going to do more videos to go into depth of what all this is um but there's lots of pre-configured stuff already set up like I was showing you here with the SKR mini E3 V3 it is all set up with all the right pins and I'm pretty sure from the looks of it it is set up for an Ender 3 printer because that looks like the right amount of run current for their Motors um where the end stops are the size of the the bad yeah I'm pretty sure this is the end of three is ready to go for Android 3. um but at the moment I'm going to do something that I'm going to tell you do not do this to prevent fire um don't change this part but I'm going to change this just so you can see what things look like so I'm changing this to minus 200 to basically say that the minimum temperature can go way below what it's going to be so I'm doing that for the extruder and for the bed minus 200 again do not do this this is a fail safe keep it at zero or even if you want you can keep it at like 10 plus degrees or something because you know your room this is basically the the minimum temperature that it will be allowed for your machine to run at so if you're in a room that never gets below 15 degrees then you can put like 10 degrees there because if it gets below 10 degrees and it's probably saying that something's wrong with a sensor and that'll shut down the board to prevent a fire so don't don't go crazy with these numbers this is purely for this so you can see what it would look like if you have your sensors plugged in and things are working so let's get that restarted and then this is how it would look if your printer is all plugged in all of your Motors and your sensors are plugged in properly and everything is working correctly you'll notice now it's talking to the MCU which is your controller board I can go to the dashboard you have your extruder your hotbed temperature see there there you are my current temperature is at negative 96. almost almost negative 100 degrees Celsius obviously that's that's not true um as a matter of fact if I even just put my finger on to give it some sort of resistance over those terminals let's see there's the hot heated bed you see I'm giving it a resistance through my finger so it's starting to go up these sensors are designed to work on um on a negative coefficient so basically means that as resistance as the heat goes up resistance um goes down so the lower the resistance the higher the heat which I guess really guys don't really need about that but just some more information about it um and so what it does is if you lose connection of that sensor the sensor get the wire gets broken or something like that it goes into this negative amount and that's why it'll shut it down that's why I say do not put anything below zero um because if you do if you have a break in your wire and it still thinks everything's okay your heater can be turned on and the heater will be going up to a full-on thermal meltdown and it'll actually it can get you know to where it'll glow red and melt your hot end because it thinks that the sensor is still in a good range even though it's not so that's why I say do not put these numbers like I did this is purely for demonstration to show you how this works I don't want you to set your house on fire um so leave it at zero at the very lowest anyways so that's that that's Clipper you're up and running if you've gone this far you can go ahead and plug in your your machine get everything configured anytime you do configuration for now will be in the printer config um the rest of this stuff I'm gonna like I said I'm gonna make other videos to go over that um but this should have gotten you to the point to where your printer is now talking to Clipper everything is set up um I can't really think of any other things that you have to know in order to get things set up but um my next videos I'm going to go over what all this is what how to set this stuff up how to make configurations work for you how to modify how to add new features and stuff like that so if that's something you want to do and you're new to this channel give us a give me a subscribe and I will hopefully update shortly I have a little time management problem here with getting time to make these videos but I'm trying to do at least two videos a month coming up here um so hopefully that works out for you and like I said I'm trying to make a little series on Clipper so you guys can anybody new to Clipper can come here as a reference and figure out how to get these things working so if you like that again give me a subscribe leave me comments down in the description or sorry in the comment Zone and let me know if you have any questions if you need help if something you're stuck on I will help you as best as I can and again I want to give a huge thank you to my new sponsor PCB way if you guys are interested in anything about PCB way getting new um pcbs made or even 3D printed Parts which they can do or you know modified sheet metal stuff for your machines they can do it all they're pretty cool people there um I've gotten some stuff made and it's pretty pretty good quality I'm impressed so I'm happy to have them on board thank you for that um also I have some affiliate links Down Below in the description um those are um you know to Victory Tech equipment if you guys are interested I'm gonna have like for instance the E3 mini there if you're looking at purchasing something like that it costs nothing extra for you but it gives me a little Kickback to help a sponsor or to help uh fund my channel so I can get some more stuff and do more tutorials so it's a big appreciation if you use that again not required it's up to you but if you're thinking about buying something it's a big help um and then anyways yeah I want to say a big thank you for watching this and sticking through if you're here at the end I know my videos are super long but they are also very detailed so you can go away truly understanding what's happening here with no more questions and if you do have questions again jump in the comments so hopefully that helped you out and uh yeah until the next video Happy printing thanks for watching

Channel: Stacking Layers

Views: 10,188

Keywords: klipper, how to, install, tutorial, firmware, btt pi, raspberry pi, skr mini e3 v3, bigtreetech, ender 3, ender, creality, CB1, MCU unable to connect

Id: Df8-7zcwiUc

Length: 77min 33sec (4653 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 17 2023