Is Klipper The Best Firmware For Your 3d Printer?

prior to building my voron 0.1 last year the main firmware i'd used is marlin firmware it's the most common 3d printer firmware that comes on just about all budget 3d printers and was the only one that i had gotten a chance to play around with and customize the firmware the vorwent printers are primarily intended to use clipper firmware and although it took me quite a while to sort of get my bearings with it i've really enjoyed using it so much so that it's become my favorite 3d printer firmware especially on 3d printers that i'm planning on modding or that i want to push performance wise clipper is a very advanced firmware and i'm still learning more and more things each and every single day but i wanted to share my experience so far and cover some of my favorite things about the clipper firmware the goal is to give you a bit more information on the firmware and to help you decide whether this is something that you might want to explore for yourself and for your 3d printer so with all that being said and without further ado let's get right into today's video [Music] clipper firmware is actually much older than i had believed and the first public release i was able to find was released back in 2016. clipper does require a raspberry pi to run which can be seen as both a positive as well as a negative thing for the positive it means that your 3d printer will have wireless printing for file transfer as well as monitoring and up to a 64-bit processor for calculating the printer movements as the negative raspberry pies have become much harder to get this past year due to supply chain shortages and if you are able to get one from a third party source they are typically sold for a much higher price so with clipper it does require you to have your controller or the board that you hook up all your peripherals to as well as a raspberry pi for the wireless control i have been beyond impressed the three main wireless interfaces are mainsail fluid and octo clipper i've almost exclusively been using mainsail and have been blown away by how snappy and feature-rich it has been in the past year of me using mainsail there have been some serious upgrades to the interface that i may need to cover in a separate video of its own with clipper all of the heavy lifting and calculations are done on the pi so it is a great way to use an older 8-bit board or even multiple of them clipper firmware makes it really easy to tie together multiple boards so let's say you want to build a printer that requires eight stepper motors but you only have two boards that both can handle up to five stepper motors and five stepper motor drivers well you can link those together up to the pi and it is a really simple process so it allows you to use a lot of your extra hardware that maybe you wouldn't be able to use previously and it's definitely a very unique and cool feature one of my absolute favorite features of clipper is how easy it is to modify your printer's config or configuration file with marlin especially on 8-bit marlin the process whenever i wanted to say upgrade something or flash the ender 3 you'd have to get a usb cable hook it up to your computer then use arduino ide to flash the the board on your printer and then with marlin 2.0 and the 32-bit boards the process is typically done with a bin file you use vs code to export or compile the file which outputs a firmware.bin file that you then plug into your printer and then it will flash the printer's firmware well with clipper it's all done via browser using a config file so you can easily open up the config file in mainsail or whichever interface you're using make a change in that file hit save and restart and in a matter of seconds your firmware has been updated to those values which makes things like modding and testing out things just so nice the method of using a usb cable or using a micro sd card isn't that big of a deal if you're just making one change but on a lot of the printers especially things like vorons or anything that i'm playing a lot around with and constantly changing or testing out things it is a very very nice feature to be able to update your firmware settings just on the fly and wirelessly you also have the ability to create macros which is exactly what it sounds like you can create buttons that are able to execute a certain set of commands this can be used to easily control things like leds or specific g-code commands for maybe a starting sequence that you want to do before you run a print on your printer like preheating the chamber i am just scratching the surface with the macros and i'm using them for just the bare minimum but i am really excited to explore them more and see some of the cool ways that they are implemented in the firmware and how they are able to interact with your printer and easily send multiple commands then there is input shaper and both macros and input shaper as far as i understand are also in reprap firmware but reprap firmware is another firmware that i just have not played around with at all up until this point input shaper is pretty magical and what it does is it allows you to print much faster without really compromising too heavily on part quality and typically one of the things when you're printing fast that happens is you get a lot of ringing or ghosting or even chatter in your printed part certain geometries we'll show it more text often shows it where let's say you're printing a part that has some text well you'll see that outline of that text sort of multiple times in the direction and that's due to vibrations while the mask that is your printer's tool head or your gantry moving around is creating the way input shaper works is it creates a signal that helps to combat those vibrations it's my understanding that it's basically creating a vibration of its own and since those vibrations are opposite of each other it's sort of neutralizing the vibrations and it's not to say that you'll 100 get rid of any ringing or ghosting but the difference with and without is quite substantial input shaper is calculated either using a manual method that requires you to print out a part that has the acceleration increasing and taking some measurements or the method that's much more common and much simpler is hooking up an accelerometer which are very inexpensive to the raspberry pi and to your printer and it will basically run through a set of automated calibrations and give you what it thinks are the best results another awesome add-on for clipper is clipper screen which allows you to use just about any touch screen that can connect to a raspberry pi with your 3d printer and i would say out of all of the touchscreen interfaces i've seen on 3d printers it is probably the best both in terms of its interface as well as the amount of control and information that that screen with clipper screen running on there is able to give you about your printer and its current print job there are many more features of the ones i've just mentioned here but these are when i was using clipper initially some of the most stand out ones that sort of blew my mind and i think my favorite ones personally the installation process is fairly simple and mainsail os sort of bundles mainsail clipper as well as moonraker that's needed into one package that makes it incredibly easy to install onto your raspberry pi it's just one os image they also have great documentation to get you up and running and the probably biggest intimidation factor i would say for anyone that is going to try out clipper is dealing with the configuration file which sort of has the different sections as well as the pin outs of the board and the specific values that being said clipper has a massive catalog of pre-defined configuration files for just about all of the most common boards as well as most of the common 3d printers that are on the market so i would say check there first see if they have your configuration file for your printer because they very likely do and then you can play around with it after the fact but i would always say even for myself if i'm customizing something i'm looking for the closest file possible and then i will sort of tweak some settings based off of that i hope that you enjoyed this video and that you have a much better idea of some of the things that make clipper just such a powerful firmware for anyone that is interested in finding out more or getting this set up on your printer i will have a link in the description over to main clos which is what i've been using the clipper documentation as well as the clipper printer configuration file directory or repository so that way you can see what they have available let me know in the comments down below if you've installed clipper and what your thoughts are also if there is a feature that i didn't cover in this video that is one of your favorite features let me know in the comments down below because there are also like i said so much to clipper that i still have not been able to play around with yet i would love to know if there's something that i need to check out that is just an awesome feature that maybe wasn't on this list on that note don't forget to like and subscribe for more great videos we make a video every single week so there's always fresh content coming your way we are in a new space uh the white blank back wall is my blank canvas we are going to figure out what we want to do and how we want to set up the studio but if anyone's wondering where everything went the pegboards and the printers on the side we moved from california to idaho there's a lot more to that story but we have an official studio now and are out of the living room which is awesome and i'm super excited for what's to come but yeah right now very blank canvas so i'm still working through what that is going to look like in a couple of weeks time here if you do want to support the channel furthermore i will place links down below in the description over to our patreon where there are some really awesome rewards huge thank you to all of our existing patreon supporters i appreciate each and every one of you allowing me to come back every single week and spend more time doing what i love which is making content for you all to enjoy on that note this has been daniel from modbod i look forward to seeing you guys in my next video peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 50,851

Keywords: klipper, klipper firmware, input shaper, pressure advance, fluidd, mainsailos, voron, best 3d printer firmware

Id: t14oSnFdsgo

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 11 2022