Is Klipper Easy Now? | Creality Sonic Pad Setup and Review

what's up everybody JJ here today we're going to be checking out the creality Sonic pad it's a device that they say should make installing Clipper extremely easy and controlling Clipper it gives you this whole screen it's a full tablet device that can control up to four printers with Clipper so we're gonna put that to the test see how it compares to the old method of using a single board computer like this this is an orange pie or Raspberry Pi would be more common if those were available so today we're going to go through the installation process see just how easy it is and see how it compares to using one of these old methods first up we should answer the question of what is Clipper firmware so the firmware is what runs on your printer makes it do all the motion and do all the printing 99 of printers come with Marlin firmware stock and there's one or two options that come with Clipper out of the box if you don't know if your printer has Clipper it comes with Marlin while Marlin firmware runs entirely on the microcontroller inside of your 3D printer Clipper needs a companion computer running Linux typically you would use a Raspberry Pi nowadays is you can't find those at MSRP so there's a lot of alternative this is an orange Pi zero two I've got one of these running on a different board or a device like this that uses a different processor you could really use any Linux computer so there's several different ways you can set it up but you do always need a separate computer talking to the microcontroller inside of your printer so your next question should be is it really worth it just to install Clipper because your printer is already running Marlin it's already printing this takes some effort and cost the two big headline features people always go back to are input shaper and pressure Advance since you've got this separate computer doing all the mathematical computations and sending only the G-Code directly over to the microcontroller to make it do all the controls you can do some pretty Advanced things a big one is input shaper that uses a small accelerometer to measure the residences of your printer so then the computer can run some advanced math computations I don't fully understand how it works but it reduces the ringing of your printer so you can reach higher speeds and not get those artifacts that you used to get on your printer the next one is pressure Advanced which has recently come to Marlin and that just helps with sharp Corners it's something about the flow rate as it slows down and speeds back up again there's several different methods of how you can tune it in and it just makes your prints look amazing the third big performance feature is just that it can go a lot faster you have this separate computer that does all the mathematical computations and the microcontroller in here just moves Hardware so you can send a lot more commands much faster but beyond the performance side of things there's a lot of ease of use situations that makes this a lot better since this computer is going to be connected to the internet you have a whole web page where you can control things upload files directly instead of using your micro SD card anymore you also get better monitoring of things you can change the configuration of your printer since it's just a text file on your computer you can go in there and change some pretty advanced settings it's just in a text file so you change that and then hit restart and it reboots and uses that new config file whereas with Marlin if you want to change any config it's a whole process of recompiling the entire firmware uploading it to the printer and I can't cover all the features here because they keep adding new ones so there's always new updates coming out and new features being added but now let's go back to the Sonic pad when it comes to the unboxing you really get everything you need straight out of the box they've got several different adapters for different International plugs and it even comes with a really nice accelerometer it's fully enclosed so there's way less chance of damaging it normally people order this type of circuit board and you have to solder on the pins yourself wire it up to the gpio pins of your Raspberry Pi whereas this is a single plug this makes things super easy to use when it comes to setting up the Sonic pad I did run into my first issue with setting up the Wi-Fi and I have seen other people mention this issue online and I pass this along to creality hopefully they can fix it in a future update but if the name of your Wi-Fi or your Wi-Fi password has any special characters in it for some reason I put an apostrophe in our Wi-Fi name when I set it up and I think that's what's causing the issue here luckily there is an ethernet port on the back of this Sonic pad so I've just been using it with ethernet anyway so the issue only really arises with people who plan to use Wi-Fi and have a special character in their Wi-Fi network name or password and hopefully that should be something I can fix in future updates the next step is getting the firmware actually loaded onto your 3D printer you've got two options here depending on which type of printer you have this is the Ender 5s1 so for this one you could just use the USB connection here which was super easy you get everything set up turn the printer off turn it back on and you know the firmware is flashed because the screen on the front doesn't turn on it just stays black that's going to happen on most 3D printers once you install Clipper since the microcontroller is just talking to your computer now it won't be talking directly to its own screen some screens might turn back on some screens like on the kingroon kp3s it just perpetually says booting now and so that's how I knew that Clipper was correctly installed and that's really all it is to get this set up it took maybe 30 minutes and a lot of that time was me starting something and then walking away while it was flashing firmware or doing some other step so I think it could have been faster if I was really trying to push the speed of it and you don't even need a separate computer all you need is this and your 3D printer and you can get it up and running comparing that to the more traditional Raspberry Pi method with this you need a computer you need a way to image a Micro SD card I use Raspberry Pi imager next you need an SSH client I use putty that's another free one then you'll need a FTP client for that I use winscp that's another free file transfer protocol and you've got to use all those there's a lot of great tutorials online I've got one if you want to go through it I think it's still a great way to do it and a good way to learn Linux and a brief introduction to using Raspberry Pi's it's not super hard but it is in depth and it takes a while to do there's a reason why this orange pie zero two is sitting here and not connected up to a 3D printer because it would take a lot of effort and I keep putting it off maybe a week down the road maybe a week down the road this on the other hand I went ahead and set it up and it's already running once you do have this set up you will want to go into the advanced settings that's where they hide all the good stuff you're going to want to do a PID tuning on both the hot end and the bed you only have to do a PID tuning after you change something if you put a new heater on your printer change that if you put a new bed on here to a vastly different type of material you might want to run a PID tuning luckily it's really easy and automated and you don't need to do that that often next up is measuring resonances this is that input shaper I was talking about earlier they make it super easy to do and luckily this cable can disconnect from the accelerometer so I mounted it onto the printhead because you will want to rerun this if you move your printer around a lot so it's going to have different resonances here versus on the ground it's tile versus a different table so if you're moving around a lot you will want to rerun that to get your best results possible I think most people will usually set their printer on a table and leave it there so for that you could run it once and then take off the accelerometer the next thing you might want to do is access the web interface here and luckily both of them are installed you've got both fluid and Mainsail those are your two web interface options they're both great they're both feature Rich they both keep coming out with new features which one you use really comes down to preference I like using fluid more some other YouTubers like using Mainsail more so it's all a preference I think try them both because they are so easy to use to access these go into your computer's browser or even your phone's browser and navigate to these specific IP address for your device if you go to the Base address you'll open up fluid if you add a colon 8819 onto the end of that address that'll take you to the main sale from here you can do things like changing your config files if you want to change your firmware settings here or generally doing more advanced things like uploading files directly onto that web page and it'll send it directly over to the Sonic pad there are so many Advanced things you can do here but this isn't the video to cover it we're really trying to cover the Sonic pad here I will leave you with one last clip or tip I will link this website that goes through all of the advanced tuning options for really any print printer but some of the things are specific to using Clipper so if you really want to get the most out of your 3D printer this is the website I would recommend so the next big feature of the Sonic pad is the ability to control up to four printers at the same time there are four USB ports here one could be used for a camera but if you want four printers you won't have a camera so if you do have several printers and you want to control it all from one easy to use device the Sonic pad is really a great option so now let's get on to the print results oh here's some examples of before and after showing just how good these things look my biggest issue specifically with this Ender 5s1 was that there was too much ringing in the prints it's a box frame but there's still a lot of ringing that came through into the parts now with input shaper and this accelerometer on here it really cuts down almost all of your ringing and you can print silk filaments really quickly now and get really great results out of it the last thing to talk about here is price it comes in at around 150 dollars and that's a really good price for what you're getting here if you were to try to create a price alternate for this you'd need first a Raspberry Pi or some sort of pie alternative you'd need a large seven inch touchscreen a custom made enclosure like this which you could just 3D print one you'd need an accelerometer you'd need a power supply and adding up all those things could easily be around a hundred dollars and it takes a lot of time and effort to get all those configured get Clipper installed on this get that firmware flashed over to your machine so the price really seems pretty competitive especially if you could control up to four printers off of this I don't have four printers ready to be set up with Clipper right now so I didn't fully test out that feature there but I will do it in the future video and show you in a short so far even connected up to one printer I'm enjoying it and I think 150 is really worth it for what Hardware you get here and how easy it makes it to get into Clipper for the power users out there who really want who to dive into that who want to be working with these single board computers and I used to think I was one of those but this device has really convinced me otherwise that convenience really is worth it at a certain point I think that just about sums up my impressions of this it's really impressed me in the first couple weeks of using it also be sure to let me know if you have a creality Sonic pad or an alternative to it is it working as well for you as it is for me is there something I missed and maybe I didn't test it out let me know in the comments I'd love to hear from you but that wraps up this video go out there create something amazing today and I'll see you in the next video [Music] thank you

Channel: JJ Shankles

Views: 15,644

Keywords: GoatToaster9, JJ, JJ Shankles, JJ3D, 3D Print, 3D Printed, 3D Printing, 3D Printer, creality sonic pad, sonic pad, creality klipper, sonic pad creality, klipper sonic pad, sonic pad review, sonic pad setup, sonic pad klipper, sonic pad guide, sonic pad basics, ender 5, ender 3 klipper, creality sonic pad review, klipper, klipper firmware, beginner klipper, input shaper, pressure advance, creality sonic pad pressure advance, 3d printer, 3d printing

Id: 76N6GrVD098

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023