Installing Klipper on the Voxelab Aquila

on today's episode we will be upgrading the stock firmware to Clipper firmware and this procedure will be for All Ships In Our Aquila whether you have an stm32g32 h32 or n32 you will be granted access to wireless printing faster printing more precise printing that's what Clipper has to offer anymore and we're going to install all of it and here we go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] folks welcome to the channel I am Leo of Prince Leo 3D thank you for joining me if I look tired because it's 5 a.m right now I had to wake up real early to try and record this because I just want to get this video to you as quickly as possible now as you'll notice this video is pretty lengthy that's not because installing Clipper is all that hard this is just new information for a lot of users and I want to make sure I explained stuff as thoroughly as possible if you already sat through this entire video or if you know a little bit about Clipper use the chapter markers below I try to make them kind of accurate so this way you can jump to a precise location in this video and start right from there the beginning of the video we're going to talk a little about what we're doing why we're doing it the middle is going to be the installation and then the ending is going to be my final thoughts and some final prints now on most Clipper installation videos they tend to cut off right after Clipper gets installed on your printer however there's a little bit more to it than that once Clipper is installed there's a configuration file that's unique to your printer that when we need to set up we're going to set that up today we're going to do some initial calibrations I'm going to show you the slicer software changes we need to make and then we'll get a few first prints out of it so by the end of this video you should be able to get some first prints with Clipper on your machine so enough for the intro let's get to more intro where we explain exactly what Clipper is why do we want it and what does it do and how does it differ from our stock firmware now I've already mentioned that Clipper is going to give us faster print speeds it's also going to print more precisely How does it go about doing all that well to understand that let's just talk about firmware on our 3D printer in general now sitting next to me here is our 3D printer the voxelibaquila and everything we kind of see right here is what I would consider the skeleton of the 3D printer we have our axes our bed our hotend all the different rails what moves that skeleton is the main board that's the brains of the operation and that's tough right here under this Electronics case we've seen it in a few other videos now I have a main board out of another printer I own right here to kind of give you an example this is basically situated right inside here on our printer this is one out of a printer to give you a better idea the brain is what moves this skeleton around how the brain operates is determined by its firmware now the stock firmware that comes on our Aquila on the main board is known as Marlin firmware this firmware is excellent It's on I would say about 99 of the 3D printers that are being sold right now because it's reliability and it's eased now on this channel you may have heard me refer to Alex's firmware and upgrading to that firmware that firmware is still Marlin the overarching framework of all those firmwares is marlin and the way Marlin operates is it has the main board of our 3D printer perform all printing related tasks that means it's going to read interpret and execute all the G-Code commands while we are 3D printing I plug an SD card into this I hit print and all the commands necessary to complete that print are handled by our main board by the microcontroller makes sense now how Clipper operates is the same way it's going to read all the G-Code perform all our commands but it separates the commands between this microcontroller our main board and an additional micro controller normally that micro troller is a Raspberry Pi and I have one here this is a Raspberry Pi zero w Clipper looks to offload some of the tasks our main board would do onto a microcontroller that is more proficient at it our Raspberry Pi the microcontroller is going to help the main board perform all the tasks of 3D printing and it's important to note with Clipper a Raspberry Pi isn't the only option we have anything that can run Linux operating system can run Clipper so if you have an old laptop an old PC laying somewhere if you can install Linux onto it it can run Clipper and then it can help your main board print this additional microcontroller the Raspberry Pi is better at processing certain commands for instance all the computational commands that are G-Code files are sliced model files are made up of this is a better processor the Raspberry Pi computes everything and it sends executable commands to our microcontroller the main board of our 3D printer only needs to execute commands that the pi gives it it no longer has to do any computational work this allows us faster speeds and more precise movements because the main board is only controlling movement and this additional microcontroller is doing all the computational work now if you've watched any videos on the channel you know I like really base vanilla examples and here's one of them it's a little wacky let's say for instance I had a chalkboard right here and next to me I had a stack of 10 pieces of paper and we're going to play a game every piece of paper has a single math problem on it I'm going to look at the papers one by one I'm going to solve the equation and I'm going to write the answer on the chalkboard and this will be a timed game so I'll take the first sheet of paper the timer starts I look at the math problem I figure it out I write the answer on the board I go to the second piece of paper same thing I write the answer on the board third fourth fifth until I'm finished with all 10 pieces of paper all the answers are on the board and the timer stops let's say I did that in about a minute and 20 seconds that's an example of how Marlin works there's one person one microcontroller doing all the work I'm figuring out the computational problems and then I'm executing them by answering them on this chalkboard now let's introduce another person my cousin Jackie or Dr Jackie in this example because he has his PhD in physics and he is infinitely smarter than I am now Dr Jackie is going to handle all our computational work in this version of the game Jackie is going to go through those 10 pieces of paper he's going to solve the problem he's going to write it on the paper and he's just going to hand me it all I need to do is take the answer from the paper and write it on the chalkboard so we start the game again Jackie hands me the first piece of paper the answer's on there I write it on the board the second one with the answer filled out I write it on the board and by the time I'm done the third one with the answer filled out is in my hands we go through all 10 pieces of paper the answers are on the board and we did it in 20 seconds that is how Clipper operates I have a microcontroller or another person doing all the heavy lifting for me all the computation all I have to do as the microcontroller is execute those commands all I did was write them on a chalkboard all our 3D printers are going to do is execute stepper motor movements that's it this allows us to print faster and print more precisely because we've offloaded the processing to something smarter than us and all we need to do is execute now adding this extra microcontroller and installing Clipper doesn't only just increase our speed it also gives us access to other great features like pressure advance and what that does is account for the pressure within the extruder another benefit of clipper is input shaping or resonance compensation and what that does is looks to reduce effects of ghosting or vibration in your 3D printer naturally there's going to be some vibration imparted to your 3D printer and now that we're able to increase the speed of our printhead those vibrations are only going to get exacerbated input shaping looks to counter or reduce those vibrations and prevent any ghosting that may occur on the outside walls of our model we also don't need to flash our firmware or our main board each time we make a change to our 3D printer for instance with Marlin when I had my regular stock Aquila and I upgraded to a BL touched Aquila I had to go on my computer compile brand new instead of firmware and then flash that onto my printer we don't need to do that anymore Clipper once we flash Clipper onto our 3D printer every change we make is going to be a Simple Text file all we'll have to do is add some text to our configuration file hit save and that's it our printer is now updated also that I mentioned we're going to be able to wirelessly access our 3D printer I know I did at some point that means I can be in any room of my house and have complete control of my 3D printer if you're using a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 you're going to have the ability to add a camera to that so you could watch your prints from any room in your house now it seems like a luxury but for some people it's a necessity mobility issues are a concern or if you have your 3D printer in a hard to get to location if it's in a basement if it's outside in the garage it's not necessarily easy to access those as we're all getting older I know I don't want to be going up and down the stairs all the time anything that can open up a web page is going to be able to access your 3D printer a phone PC a laptop a tablet A Fire tablet anything like that if you can open a web browser you'll be able to access your 3D printer there's got to be some negatives right well there certainly is and the biggest one you've already heard me talk about additional Hardware we need another microcontroller to work with Clipper now in our case today it's going to be a Raspberry Pi zero nowadays though I'm sure you know finding a Raspberry Pi is really hard finding one that's affordable is even harder they are charging up the nose for Raspberry Pi's now so this is a big enough hurdle now like I said anything that can run the operating system Linux can run Clipper that's still a hurdle for certain people and I know it's a non-starter for others now along with the additional Hardware of a pi we also need to power this pod so that's even more hardware and then we need to connect this pi to our printer additional Hardware so that's a data cable a power cable and a pi itself and now also we're going to lose the ability to use our screen after we flash Clipper onto our 3D printer it is no longer going to be compatible with our screen for me personally I don't find it as really a hindrance because we're literally going to have access to our printer from almost any device we have on us our phones usually in our pocket you might have a computer somewhere you'll be able to access it everywhere the last negative of clipper is the time sync you have to watch this video you have to actually install a Clipper you have to learn sort of the new peccadillos of clipper if you have a single printer and you're having a great time Marlin's working good maybe Clipper isn't a necessity for you and by no means is clip a really a necessity for anyone Clipper is just going to give us some upgraded feature and I personally believe some better prints everyone's got a life outside of this hobby right so if you don't have the time to devote to installing and maintaining some new firmware and maybe Clipper isn't for you but if you have a pie if you have the time you want to delve into this new and unique firmware stick around because it is fine very fun so now let's look at what we're going to need to perform the installation that I show on this video for today's installation we'll be using a Raspberry Pi and that could be any Raspberry Pi you have available except for the Raspberry Pi Pico then you'll also need two SD cards One SD card is going to act as the operating system for your Raspberry Pi that should be a minimum of eight gigabytes and it's preferred that it's high speed the secondary SD card is simply used to flash Clipper onto the Aquila and that could be the SD card that came with your printer then you'll need a data cable to connect the pi to the Aquila and keep in mind the input USB for the vaux lebakila is a micro USB finally we just need a power supply to power on and maintain our Raspberry Pi and for today's installation we're going to be using a script to help us and it's called Kia k-i-a-u-h Clipper installation and user helper it really boils this process down to just copy and pasting lines of code so everyone involved for creating and maintaining the Kia GitHub we thank you so without further Ado let's get to installing Clipper on our fox Lab Aquila the first step is to take that high speed performance SD card that you kind of splurged on and plug it into our computer and we're going to flash an operating system onto this the first thing we want to do with our SD card is format it now whenever we format an SD card it will erase all the files all the media off that SD card so if there's anything on there you want to keep make sure you moved it off beforehand I've opened up my file explorer I found my mounted SD card right here and as you can see I've moved all my files off already I find it in the file explorer I right click it and a menu comes up I'm looking for the option to format I click on format and get another menu will appear and now this is where we're going to choose how to format it we want to choose FAT32 file system and 40 96 bytes for the allocation this is how it has to look fat 32 40 96 bytes after that you can choose a quick format if you wish hit start and the formatting will begin but not before warning us one more time that everything will be erased off this SD card so this is your last opportunity to move anything off that you don't want to be lost I hit OK because my SD card has been already removed of its contents and the formatting begins it's pretty quick I get a notification when it's complete and we can move on now that our SD card is formatted we're going to flash the operating system we want to work with on there this is going to be the first of the three free softwares we use this is Raspberry Pi Imager you can go to the website and download it when it opens up it'll look similar just to mine right here so the first thing we're going to do is choose an operating system we click this button and a bunch of different operating system choices come up what we're looking for is Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit light the light version so that's under the other section and then it's the first one right here Raspberry Pi OS light 32-bit click on that that's the operating system we want to use next to that is storage that's the SD card we need to find that I click on choose storage and the only thing I have mounted right now is my SD card so it's a very obvious choice for me but if you have all their SD cards mounted make sure you are selecting the correct one you do not want to try and write an operating system onto something that is not prepared for it now the next step would be to write that would just simply write the operating system onto our SD card but we want to make some changes beforehand these changes are going to make our life a lot easier once it comes to setting up our PI we click this little gear icon and an advanced option menu opens the first thing we want to do is we want to change the hostname I have multiple Raspberry Pi's in my home so if I try and search for restaurant pi.local I don't know which one I'm going to Ping so for this example I'm going to write Clipper setup you can name this whatever you want this is going to help us identify our pie later on so you can name it whatever you want dot local but make sure you remember the name after that we're going to enable SSH ssh is the function in which we're going to be able to wirelessly communicate with our Raspberry Pi this is what's going to be called a headless setup our PI is not going to have a keyboard and it's not going to have a monitor so we're going to use the computer we're currently on right now to access that pi and to make changes to any files enabling SSH is how we do that down here set username and password username you can put whatever you want I usually keep it as Pi and then you can write yourself a easy pass for the hard password whatever you write make sure that you jot it down somewhere else so you do not forget it that's how we're going to log into the pi after that we're going to configure wireless LAN this is basically going to tell the pi what wireless communication what Wi-Fi is going to be using so right now I'm Tethered to my phone so it already pre-populates my SSID so if your computer is logged on to the same Wi-Fi your Raspberry Pi is going to be using all that information will be pre-populated if not this is the time to add that you're going to put the wi-fi name and then you can place the Wi-Fi password so when the Raspberry Pi powers on it can immediately connect to the Wi-Fi after that you're going to select your country I don't know that this is a necessary step but I will say I always do it I am in the US so I have to scroll all the way down to us I have imagined I have to imagine this has to do with time zones and timing issues I don't think that's a real big problem for us but it's better to be safe than sorry and that's it after all those different fields have been filled out we can hit save and now we can go to right we have the right operating system we have the right SD card that we're writing that operating system onto we've made adjustments in the advanced options so our life is a lot easier and now we're just going to click right it lets us know yet again anything on on that SD card is going to be erased we already did that we don't worry so we want to continue now this may take a little bit maybe five to ten minutes so you can relax when it is finished it may ask you to format the disk again do not do that if you reformat it if you remember it will erase everything on the disk some windows PCS ask you to do that some don't so if it does ask you cancel it deny it do not reformat it and right here it says write successful and it shows that my operating system was written properly onto the SD card it's already dismounted it for me so all I need to do is remove it from the computer and we can move on to the next step we've removed our SD card from our computer our operating system has been flashed onto this card we're going to put it into our Raspberry Pi and then all we need to do is power on our Raspberry Pi I plug my power supply into the wall and then I plug it into my Raspberry Pi give it two or three minutes to perform all its necessary startup routines it's going to immediately connect to the internet and then after those two three minutes have elapsed jump back onto the computer and we can continue with the installation we will now be using the second of our free softwares and this is called putty when you download and open it up you'll have the same screen as I have right here this is going to be able to give us access to the Raspberry Pi wirelessly now the way we're going to do that is through the IP address however if this is our first time turning on the reply we don't really have the IP address now if you have access to your Wi-Fi's administrative settings or administrative page it's very possible you can go on there you can see all the devices connect to it and you can start using the IPS but if you live in an apartment a dorm someone some other spot you're using public Wi-Fi I don't know if you cannot get that IP address we're going to use that dot local address that we set up during the writing of the software of the operating system rather so I use Clipper setup dot local whatever the hostname.local was in there and then I click open and it's going to try and communicate with my Raspberry Pi now mine was very quick it usually takes a few more seconds than that a potential security breach warning comes up we get yes we know it's our pie and now we can log it the first thing it comes up is the login name so our name was Pi at least that's what I kept it as hit enter and then a password screen and now you're going to enter the password that you put in for your Raspberry Pi during the setup phase and just like that we are now in our rasporate file we are at the command line and we can make any settings or changes that we need to make before we move forward there's one thing we need to find out that will help us and that's the IP address of the pie we've been logging in with the hostname.local for now but we need to get the IP address it's a simple command ifconfig hit enter and it will give you a load of information we'll be looking for the WLAN line and then right here it will give you the IP address so that's 192.168.242.41 that's for my specific pie do not copy that it will be different for every unit now we can use this IP address to log into our PI from now on the First Command we're going to send our PI is just to make sure it's up to date and now all this is basically going to be copy and paste from here on out everything is going to be in the description all the steps and then if you go to my website I'm going to have a text-based tutorial on all these steps so if I'm speaking too quickly I'm going through things too fast those are two avenues that you can read through and take them at your own pace the first command is sudo app get update I copy it in there and I hit enter and then it runs that command and this is going to update our PI to make sure that all our libraries and all repositories are up to date once that is finished our next command is to install git now the rest of these commands can be found directly from the Keo website I'm going to link that also in the description or you can just use the commands as I am going through them git is necessary to install Kia which is going to help us very tremendously help us install Clipper install Moonraker and then install our front end Kia makes this process so simple for us that it's it's really mind-blowing how easy it is if you're worried about this at this point do not worry we are going to get through it now this last command is going to be a block of commands and then after that we are in here so it's changing the directory and then it's cloning the GitHub that KIA is kept at so it's going to immediately open up the Kia main menu once it is complete it's completed and now we're looking at Kia's main menu now if you have an n32 to chip in your Aquila these are the next steps you need to take if you don't if you have a g32 skip to the next chapter you don't need to do what we're about to do we need to change the repository to access information for the n32 chip we are going to quit out of Kia by using the Q command then hit enter or back to the pi and we can actually close putty out so I'm going to x out of this closing the session and now we're back to just our computer we're going to now use win SCP this is the third piece of free software everyone else is going to use this later on in the video but right now we are going to be using this right now I have it here but I'm going to search for it open it up and your winning SCP is going to look just like mine and it's similar to putty it's another way to SSH or to wirelessly communicate with our PI and the same scenario applies we can put in the host name or the IP address and then we can already pre-populate the username and the password then log in same sort of warning comes up we know what it is it's rpio can hit yes we can access it now the way when SCP works it's a little different it doesn't just look like a terminal line like putty the left side of the screen here is all the files and folders local to your computer that you're using so for me this is my laptop and on the right this is the pi and all its folders so what we want to do we see right here the first folder we have is a Kia folder we're going to open that up and we're looking for Clipper repos.text example open that up by double clicking it and all it is is a simple text file now this text file actually tells you exactly what you need to do this is extra repos that our Raspberry Pi is going to pull information from the base repos now when I say that all I'm meeting is really just a library the base libraries that are used for Clipper don't have the information for our n32 we need to tell them where to look for that information and we do that in this text file so what we do is we're going to delete all these example files or example links down here so now that we've deleted the bottom example repositories we need to add our custom repo and the place we get that is GitHub that is where it's being hosted by start 2z what we need to do is direct Clipper to go here and get the correct libraries or repositories so to do that and again this is all going to be in the description you don't need to do what I'm doing you could simply copy and paste I'm just kind of showing you where all this comes about and lower this code button and I get the current link I can copy that and that link for the GitHub is going to get pasted right here at the bottom of this text file then I need to point it to the correct branch so right here I can check how many branches there are there's three the active branch is Aquila n32 I copy that then I paste that right at the end so now when we go to look for the repository in Clipper this is where it's going to point we need to point it to this location because this has the information for our n32 chipped Aquila now I'm going to save this text file once it's saved I can close it out now I need to rename this because I need the dot example to go away I right click it I select rename and then I'm going to erase or delete everything after txt so dot example goes bye bye I save it and now immediately you can see it turns into a text folder because now it's only dot txt that's what we want to do that's how it needs to look after that we can close out win SCP and we can rejoin the tutorial proper in order to do that we open up putting we log back in to R pi username and password as always then we're going to change to the directory to Kia then after that we're going to reopen the key a menu we're now back all on the same page and we can continue with this tutorial and now first thing I'm going to do is maximize my screen so you can see everything a little better first thing we need to do is install Clipper itself Moonraker which speaks between our front end and Clipper and then our front end either Mainsail fluid or if you wish octoprint but I will not be going over that in this tutorial so we're going to select number one right up here and then hit enter we start with the firmware and the APO API Clipper is number one so I select that one and then I hit enter right now I'm using Python 2.7 I believe it's obsolete as of the beginning of this year python 3.x is saying experimental still I use Python 2.7 on all my builds I haven't had a problem yet I'm going to choose Python 2.7 that's one I hit enter and it wants to know how many instances of clipper we're going to set up for this installation it's going to be a single one I hit enter to that then I hit yes y for yes and it starts doing its thing this can take a while sit back enjoy yourself you don't have to do anything during the installation and we'll pick it back up once it's all finished so 17 minutes later and my installation of clippery is almost complete it's now asking if I want to add the pi the username which is what we're logged into on this Raspberry Pi to the group and we do want to do that so we hit yes and enter and it adds it and we are finished so that clocked in at a total of about 18 minutes for me to install Clipper once that's finished though we can move down the list and now we're going to look and install Moonraker so that's number two I enter two I hit enter and it's the same thing as the Clipper installation we're going to ask answer a few prompts and then it's going to do its thing so we want to install Moonraker yes we do and now Moonraker is going to be the API or the interface between the Clipper firmware and our front-end web interface of either Mainsail or fluid so Moonraker is what communicates between these two we're never really going to know it's there and that's its purpose it's just supposed to make a very streamlined experience for us so sit back again relax this shouldn't take as long as the 18 minute Clipper install at least for me but this should take a little bit of time Moonraker installed for me in about eight minutes much much quicker than Clipper and now we're on to the final portion of the installation and that is our web interface which is right down here you have the option of choosing either Mainsail or fluid I always choose fluid I have way more experience with it I think it's a really really good interface it's clean it does everything I need to do so that's what we'll be installing today in the tutorial so I am going to select number four then I hit enter and it looks identical to the last few installations at some point during the installation you are going to get prompted if you want to add webcam support that will be downloading the mjgp streamer if you have a Raspberry Pi three or four by all means those can handle a webcam just perfectly if you're running a Raspberry Pi 0w though like I often do those really aren't powerful enough to handle webcam support properly you're also going to be prompted if you want to install recommended macros yes is the answer to that even though we're probably going to get an upgraded config file having some recommended macros in there at first will give us a good idea what we're looking at so just hit yes to that and keep moving fluid finished up installing for me it took around 15 minutes I don't remember it being that long but I guess it is what it is so expect a little bit of a weight if you are going to be installing that that is it we have installed the three Horsemen of the Clipper apocalypse onto our pie and we're ready to move on Clipper was installed Moonraker and then your Weber interface we did fluid now all we need to do is create the firmware that's specific to our printer main board copy that onto an SD card and Flash the firmware onto our main board that's it we're almost there now we're gonna go back a menu so we hit B and then enter now it's at this point that we're going to do some Divergence between the chips if you are an n32 chip Aquila owner please follow this next Port if not you can skip this chapter this is n32 only hit six and go into our settings we need to select that custom repo that we add to the text file earlier in this tutorial from there we're going to look to set a custom Clipper repository number two hit enter after that our custom repo that we installed is going to be the only one up there so we're going to hit the number zero hit enter it's going to warn us that the current Clipper repos will be erased and replaced with this custom repository that's exactly what we want so we can hit Y and then hit enter and the Clipper repositories will begin to switch they should only take a few minutes but once it's successful it'll tell you that our new branch has been switched to the Kila Dash n32 version and that's exactly what we want we can now hit V for back then enter and then one more screen back B enter and now we are all yet again on the same page going forward if you are an h32 user you do not need to follow along with this next portion my n32 my stm32 my g32 chipped Aquila owners please continue the next thing we're going to do is go into the advanced menu number four and hit enter and from here we're going to select to build only firmware so for me that is the second option so I put two for build only firmware and then I hit enter when this menu opens up we are now going to create the firmware image for our respective chips now I don't know if the term firmware image is actually correct I've heard it thrown around a few times and I really like it so that's what I'm using firmware image okay navigating this menu up and down on your I would call it a d-pad because I'm from the 8-Bit error but I guess this is a up and down arrow on the keypad of your computer and the right arrow selects now the first thing we want to do is enable extra low level configurations everyone is going to be doing this that opens up more options we drop down microcontroller architecture we need to change that hit right and bring it down to SDM microelectronics stm32 everyone will be selecting that as well and we select that by hitting right on the control pad below that processor model that's going to stay the same for everyone we skip this only 10K IB we don't need to worry about this now if you have a g32 chip in your Aquila you will select this disable swt at startup for Giga device stm32 that's the g32s if you have an n32 chip in your Aquila you will select this option build for nation n32 g45xmcu if you have an sdm32 chip you will select neither you will just keep moving on all the chips we're all going to do the same thing here communication interface I enter this menu I go down one space to serial on you you start one PA 10 pa9 we select that board rate should be 250k that's perfect and that's it we're good to go it was very simple was it not just to recap g32 images should look like this n32 images should look like this stm32 images should look like this nothing extra need be selected and that's it when we're finished after you've selected the appropriate model I'll do n32 for this scenario once you're finished we're going to type in Q which will quit and it will prompt us to save we do want to save the configuration so we type in y and now it builds the firmware for us after a few minutes you'll get a notification that your firmware has been built and now we can close down putty hit B enter we can quit out of here Q enter now we can close down putty now our next step is to copy that firmware file we just built onto an SD card I have mounted my SD card I find it with my File Explorer right here and again we did this once earlier we're going to format this right click format the format is the same as before FAT32 40 96 bytes in allocation size of course again if we format it it's going to erase everything make sure there's anything on this SD card you want to save it's off already and then once I have everything clear to the SD card I start the format and now we're going to use the third of the free softwares that I spoke about earlier and this is called win SCP it's very similar to putty my n32 owners have already heard this speech from me this is another way to wirelessly communicate with their Pi so we do the same thing as putty we enter the IP address that we want to access which is a pi and then from here we can already pre-fill the username and password now when SCP has a better interface for us the left side here is all files and folders local to our computer and the right side are files and folders local to whatever we log into and in this case it's the pi what we're looking for is the Clipper folder which is right here double click to open it and then we're looking for the out folder which is right here double click that to open it and then we're looking for clipper.bin that is our firmware so now on the left side of winsap I want to locate and select my SD card I drop down this menu here and right here this is where I have it mounted as a D drive so I select it there is nothing currently on it which is good all I need to do to copy this file over is simply drag and drop it that's it it's copied now we can close down win SCP by using the X right up here we don't want to save this and that's it now I can double check open up my File Explorer navigate down to my D drive the SD card and there it is now of course we need to do some more work in order to get this properly executable as a firmware for our Kila this next part is only for my Aquila owners that have an h32 with their printer we've mounted an SD card we need to format it first and this was just like before I find the XT card with my file explorer I right click it I select format and the same formatting goes FAT32 4096 allocation bytes make sure there's nothing that you need to keep on this SD card because it will be lost once we format once the formatting is complete we're going to download our DOT bin file this website is in the description but this is Steve gotthard's h32 Clipper repository they've done all this work for us and we get to reap these benefits we navigate to this website drop down to the assets drop this down and we're looking to download the Clipper underscore 01.fin click it and it will begin to download I open up my File Explorer I go to my downloads folder I copy clip it up in that I navigate to my SD card and I paste the file right in here that's all firmware file it's really simple for us the steps we need to take now for this to flash on archila are as follows we need to create a new folder and it needs to be named firmware simply firmware everything's lower case nothing's capitalized and now we can place this firmware file into that folder all you need to do is make sure this file is not named anything that's been flashed previously I doubt you flashed anything named Clipper but what I like to do is after this I like to write the date just so I know when I did it and it usually makes the file name somewhat unique I can eject this SD card and I should be able to flash this firmware now we take our SD card plug it into our power down printer and then turn the power on you'll see the screen begins to glitch out then after about 20 or 30 seconds the Clipper firmware should have taken we can now power the printer down and remove the SD card now we can access our printer from the internet to do so I open an internet browser and input the IP address we've been using into the address bar now we are looking at the home page of fluid which is the front end we are using to manage our 3D printer you can see there's an error and that's because we have not yet configured our printer within fluid so let's do that now on the sidebar to the left of the screen click on the configurations tab Now find and open the printer.cfg file this is our printer configuration file and it tells the firmware everything you need to know about our physical printer that would be the max temp build size pin mappings of our board BL touch or non bed mesh information if you have a BLT so on and so forth this document is the end all bill for our printer within Clipper as you can see there is none of that here right now so we need to edit now for a completely custom printer this could take some time but for more common printers like our Vox lab Aquila there are already vanilla configuration files for us to copy and paste and then we can customize them to our specific machine so let's find that now we'll close this out and we'll move to the right side of the screen I click on config underscore examples and this will open up all the configuration examples or the vanilla configurations that Clipper has in the search bar I'll write Aquila and search and see if there's one listed as you can tell there are no results now if you have an n32 a killer you actually are going to get a result for everyone else we'll have to do some extra work to get there we're going to open up a new internet Tab and we're going to navigate to the GitHub that is hosting the n32 firmware for Clipper now this is provided to us by stas2z we thank them very very much they made the n32 Clipper possible as well as giving us an example configuration to find it I go down to the branches drop down I make sure I have Aquila n32 selected then I go to the configuration folder I click that to open it now we are in the configuration folder where all the vanilla configurations are I'm going to use Ctrl F to find it a little quicker I type in n32 and then it finds it for me now click on it to open it up there's a lot more information here now we want to copy this and paste this into our printer.cfg I use the top right button here to copy all the text and then we go back to our printer open up operator.cfg file now we're going to delete these two sections we want to keep fluid.cfg everything else can go and then we just paste in the printer.cfg that we copied now this configuration file is ship agnostic even though it is in the n32 repository this will work with every chip stm32 g32 h32 and of course n32 now whenever we make an adjustment to our CFG file we want to save it and then restart Clipper restarting it is what lets that new configuration file take effect the button right up here save and restart that's exactly what we want to do I click that it saves the file and it restarts Clipper and now when Clipper starts it's going to use that new updated configuration file and you'll see I have no issues I am ready to go and as you see Clipper is not reporting any issues if I was to hit the Home tab you'll see I have thermals I have a reading on my nozzle and my bed and everything is working properly now you might run into an issue just like this that has to do with something we have to input within printer.cfc let's do that now reopen printer.cfg and go down to the serial section your serial address is likely wrong and the Raspberry Pi and the printer are not speaking properly so what we're going to do is minimize our internet Tab and reopen putty log back into our Raspberry Pi and we want to do this while everything is hooked up and everything is powered once we're back in the Raspberry Pi we're going to run this single text command after we input it and hit enter it gives us back an address we copy that we go back into our printer.cfg file and we paste it next to the serial section pop that gives the Raspberry Pi the right address for the printer and they can speak properly we can now save and restart our firmware and that MCU error should have gone away that's likely not going to happen to everybody or anybody even but if it does happen in the future even on a different printer this is the solution we have everything hooked up properly I'm getting no errors through fluid but now before I move on I just need to make some changes to the printer.cfg file from my specific printer this is a vanilla configuration I have some add-ons that I need to adjust within my printer.cfg the only one I have to do for my printer is a BL touch within this configuration the only stipulation is it can't be within another block of text I just need to find some open space and paste some stuff in here I have a BL touch so I need to add language for that I'm going to add three sections I paste it in right here those sections are BL touch safety home and bed mesh now all this information is from other configurations I already have with other printers all my configuration files are going to be available on my website so if you have any questions or if you want to copy my configuration you can go there and do so now I'm going to gloss over this information because it's kind of outside of the range of what we're doing here today but the BL touch section is going to talk about the actual physical BL touch that's what we're going to put my x and my y offsets safety home is where the BLT is going to home and I want the home somewhere around the middle of my bed the bed mesh is now going to be our new probing grid the probing operation will recreate a bed mesh is all controlled under this information now that itself is very important and again outside of the range outside of the scope of what we're doing today I'm going to follow up with a very short video on how to calibrate all that because it is very important if you have a BL touch I've added that stuff that's the only things I need to add right now for my printer in order to bottle home and get it started I save and restart because I want to save this information and I want to take a effect and then once I do I navigate to the home menu and I can home all my axes and make sure that the auto home function is working before we do our initial calibrations and first print I want to give you a tour around the fluid menu this is the home screen fluid and this top left box here is the status of our printer when I'm not printing the ready option shows me the previous print and gives me some information on it reprint has the last three models I printed for a very quick for easy access to reprint it next to that is The Thermals this is our nozzle current temperatures of our extruder our nozzle and our heated bed that's the bed current temperature if I want to change the temperature it's as simple as writing in the Target temperature hitting enter to execute the power of the heating cartridge goes 100 and my temperature starts to increase same goes with the bed all I need to do is enter a temperature in the Box hit enter and we'll begin to go there I'm going to cool down by going zero zero below the status box tool this is the print head this is where we move our printhead this is the x-axis left and right y-axis back to forward and here is the z-axis control up and down these are the increments that we will move all those axes a tenth of a millimeter a millimeter 10 millimeters 25 50 and 100. Clipper has a safety feature it will not let you move any of the axes before you home all so you have to do that before you want to move any one of these individual axes if you want to turn the stepper Motors off to move the print head around for example this little drop down Motors off also if you want to snap to a specific location you can input it in the boxes right here and the printhead will snap there if you need to recalibrate your e-steps this is the extruding menu this is where you're going to do it the length of the Extrusion right now it's set to 10 millimeters and the speed currently I don't have the option to extrude or retract the nozzle has a safety temperature it's usually 170 degrees so you'll need to bring your nozzle to that temperature in order to extrude the amount of filament all those parameters should be written within your printer.cfg to the right of that menu under thermals is console this is basically the terminal line of our printer this is where we issue commands and then the printer tells us what it's doing I'm going to hit the little trash can and I'll show you a very simple command homing all the axes that's a g28 so it shows me in the console exactly what it's doing we're going to be using this very shortly this is one of the most helpful things that Clipper and fluid have in store for us if you need to know some of the initial commands enter help and these are some helpful commands that you can run now if anything is written in your console for instance save config if I click on it it will get populated into the bottom of the command line and then I can execute that under that jobs this is basically the SD card of our printer when we had Marlin these are all the available print jobs or G-Code files that I have saved onto the pi that we can use to print if I want to add a file I need to plus I con I can upload it or I can upload it directly to print if I want to print one of these files all I need to do is click on it and the option comes up I click on it I can print it I can rename it I can remove it I could preheat to the given temperatures that are within that file there's more menus if you have a camera you'll have a menu down here for it there's other menus there we're not going to go over these today these are the four menus we're really concerned about if I want to change how these menus are oriented top three dots then adjust dashboard layout and right here you can see I have four available columns I can move these over and make it four I left click the dots of a menu hold it and then I can move it over when I exit the layout mode however I left it that's how it will appear so adjust these accordingly and get them comfortable for you now for some initial calibrations before we start our first print the first two calibrations we're going to do are PID temperature calibration so we're going to tune our hot end and we're going to tune our bed within fluid we go to the console and we input a single command this right here is the command to tune the hot end the only thing we need to edit is the last set of numbers you want to set this number to wherever your current printing temperature is going to be I'm going to be printing pla at around 205 so that's what I set it to I hit enter and a PID Auto calibrate begins this is going to take several minutes but at the end it's going to give me the option to save my configuration I'm not going to do that quite yet I'm then going to calibrate my bed PID and that is this command here again I need to edit the last number to what my bed is going to print around I'm going to be printing at 60 degrees Celsius so that's when I set my calibration number two I hit enter and now the bed calibration begins when the bed calibration is done and it will take several minutes we get the option again to save config now we want to do that we click on Save config in the console it populates it in the terminal line for us and we send that command to the printer what that does is the same thing the save and restart command did when we were in our printer.cfg it saves those calibrations we just had to our printer.cfg and then it restarts for us now we're going to check to make sure those calibrations took let's open up our printer.cfg and we're going to scroll down to extruder and you'll see we have this additional information here and then if we scroll all the way down to the bottom of our DOT CFG file you'll see we now have settings for our PID extruder and our bed now while we're in our printer.cfg we're going to calibrate our e-steps now if you already calibrated your e-steps this is going to be really simple if not you're going to need to go ahead and recalibrate your e-steps now Clipper calls e-steps rotation distance the general principle is the same but the formula is slightly different doing an entire rotation distance calibration from scratch is outside the realm of this video I'm going to have a future video on that but if you already have your e-cepts which I really hope you did converting it to rotation distance is so quick the formula for this is the amount of rotations in our stepper motor that's 200 times the number of micro steps 16 for our printer that math comes out to 3200 3200 is the number everyone's going to use you're going to divide 3200 by your previous e-steps it's that simple the resulting figure is going to be your rotation distance my previous East steps were 422.5 so the calculation I did was 3200 divided by 422.5 that gave me 7.573964 yada yada that is now my rotation distance we've converted e steps to rotation distance I want to take three numbers past the decimal point so I will turn this into 7.574 I'm going to round up I go into my printer.cfg I erase the value that was next to rotation distance and then instead I add this new number this new value 7.574 I want this to take effect now so I save and restart my firmware final calibration before my first print because I have a BL touch is to adjust the Z offset and create a bed mesh adjusting the Z offset very simple in Clipper I go to the console and I insert the command probe underscore calibrate I hit enter and it executes the command it's going to Auto home our machine and then it's going to give me a z offset menu to begin calibrating we lower the nozzle close to the bed and I'm using a post note to feel the distance once I get some good drag on the Post-it note I hit apply that updates my current Z offset I'm not finished though I do need to save and restart the firmware or to take effect so I do that and then lastly with the BL touch I'm going to create a bed mesh because I don't want to probe before each print anymore it takes a little time I'm actually just going to recall a previous mesh and Marlin we knew this as m420s1 that was the command so now I need to create that mesh I go to the tune menu on the left side of fluid I have to order home before I do this and then once I do I click calibrate and this runs through the bed mesh probing program the way in which my BL touch is going to probe is determined by my printer.cfg file Under The Heading bed mesh again not going to go into that it's a little complicated it'll be a future video on exactly how to tune this properly once that is finished we can jump over to our slicer make some changes and then get our first print we're in our slicer and we need to make a few changes but we can slice our model for Clipper we need to First make sure there are no acceleration controls active I go into the search box on my profile I type hosting I can search coasting enable costing that needs to be unchecked while we slice for Clipper after that I drop down my printer I go into manage printers and then machine settings I need to change the start G-Code Clipper no longer will be reading all this sheets this is going to be our first introduction to macros and that's what we're going to use for our start and NG code I'm going to erase everything in my start cheat code and instead I'm going to write start underscore print that is our macro what a macro is is simply a shortcut it's a single phrase or word that is going to execute commands what start print is going to do is execute everything that was written under Start G-Code for us let's jump back over to our printer.cfg find an open area just like we did for that BL touch section and we're going to paste in the start G-Code macro you can get this from my website this macro is good for Cura if you're using super slicer or prusa slicer you might need to use something else with this start print macro is going to do is anytime the printer reads start print it's going to execute this block of code that's under it and all this block of code says right now is exactly what it said in our star cheat code we're going to get a prime line it's going to call a previous BL touch mesh for me and then it's going to start printing we're also going to do the same thing for our NG code we're going to use an end underscore print macro then I'm going to hit save and restart firmware now I can go back to Kira I can delete everything in my NG code and in its place we're simply going to write end underscore print that's it we don't need to make any other changes to our slicer close out our menus we can add a calibration Cube something very simple to print we can slice this and then save the file to a local folder we go back to our printer through fluid go to the home screen now we can go down to jobs click the plus button and upload this print or we can upload and print it immediately whatever you want to do I'm going to upload and print it immediately and then our print begins and you'll see the bed temperature is starting to rise that means the print begins we can also look in our console and it'll tell us the same thing [Music] [Music] all right folks we're at the end we've done it Clippers installed you've seen some of the prints we nearly cut the print time in half for this calibration dragon and yet we still maintain this high quality awesome now Clipper is a lot more than what we've gone over today like I had mentioned an exploring Clipper is what everyone needs to do going forward I'm gonna have way more videos now involving Clipper we're going to go over the calibrations we're going to look at how to make a bed mesh if you need it but I highly recommend you go to the Clipper website read through the information they have there because it's all worthwhile what I'm teaching you is really just stuff I've learned by reading through those Clipper docs so if you have questions that I can't answer or I haven't answered yet please go to that website and peruse their database I hope this video was informative I tried to compile as much information as concisely as I could if you have more questions if I wasn't as clear as I need to be always check my website generally there's a text-based article that follows these videos going to be the same same thing for this video go to the comments ask a question I answer all the comments other people answer the comments which is great it's a whole Community thing because I am an imperfect person I make mistakes and it helps when we have more heads more brains looking at a problem we solve it easier and we solve it better just like Clipper the more micro controllers we can add the more brains we can add the better we're all going to end up if you don't want to leave a comment if you want to join a broader discussion join the Discord we share every day it's really awesome I thank everyone that has continued to contribute and I also thank you for all the feedback I usually at a minimum share the thumbnail design for my YouTube videos and I always get great feedback so thank you thank you thank you all for contributing upcoming we have the third section of my dual z-axis video Kevin AKA Sam's dual belt driven Z modification it's awesome the video is close to being done I kind of skipped the line with this Clipper video because I really wanted to get this information active to you after that dual Z belt video bamboo Labs X1 Carbon it is almost here I just got to ship a notification today is Thursday next Tuesday I should be receiving my X1 Carbon I'm so excited have my dad coming over to help me with that video you're going to love it I think a lot of people are going to get stunned by what that printer is capable of I mean I don't even have the printer yet and I'm already stunned just by seeing other people's posts reading through their Discord I am so excited now apart from those videos I also have a filament run out sensor video coming we're gonna compare and contrast a few different sensors so please if you like this video if you like what I'm doing here want to see more interested on keeping up to date with the Clipper things we're going to be doing to our Kila subscribe to the channel if you like the video hit that thumbs up thing it tends to help whatever algorithm is happening helps the channel overall so thank you all so much I really appreciate and as always until next time boys girls everybody else keep on printing [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you

Channel: PrintsLeo3D

Views: 23,689

Keywords: klipper, intro, aquila, voxelab, ender 3, creality, klipper guide, installation, klipper install, beginner, beginner klipper, klipper intro, faster prints, print faster, high speed, better quality, increase quality, throughput

Id: a6ru0mH3F8M

Length: 57min 48sec (3468 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2022