Klipper 3d Printer Firmware - What is it? Why do I want it?

hello in today's video i'm going to be talking about and going over some of the advantages of the clipper 3d printer firmware [Music] so for those familiar with the channel you know i'm a big fan of clipper as the firmware of choice for my 3d printers in fact all the printers you see in front of me all six of them do run clipper as their firmware currently now clipper has been around for a few years now and really in the past year it's made some really good leaps and bounds to the point where i feel confident saying that it is my favorite firmware for 3d printers and i definitely recommend it for those that are looking to upgrade their printers from stock firmware or they are doing a self-built printer and they're looking for some variant of firmware to run on their printer now when it comes to running clipper on your 3d printer it does have many advantages and there are some things you need to keep in mind when it comes to installing it there are a few minor disadvantages to it but no firmware is perfect and i'll cover both the advantages in the disadvantages in this video so starting off what is clipper and how do i install it on my printer well clipper is a standalone firmware for your 3d printer what this means is it doesn't run on top of marlin such as an octoprint on a raspberry pi it completely replaces your printer's built-in firmware you will have to re-flash your controller board but it still uses a raspberry pi now how clipper works is the actual firmware that does all the computation and the math involved in the kinematics and controlling your printer is all handled on the raspberry pi itself this lets you have a much more powerful controller running your printer and the built-in controller in your printer in this case here in skr mini this all it does is handle the instructions sent to it from the raspberry pi what this allows you to do is run things like older hardware such as this old ramps board here at step rates that would be unattainable with the 8-bit built-in mcu controlling things and it allows to push newer hardware such as skr boards for example with their 32-bit processors well beyond that even 32-bit marlin can handle now for those familiar with octoprint you may be worried about bandwidth limitations when it comes to communicating however you do have to remember with clipper all the computation is handled on the raspberry pi itself so interpreting the g-code and understanding it and carrying out the commands is all handled on your raspberry pi all that is communicated to the mcu on the controller board itself is simple commands basic instructions move here do this do that there is no processing being done on your controller board so a basic usb connection is plenty in fact i run printers that run on a raspberry pi zero which with clipper and its lightweight interfaces there's much less overhead in terms of processing power needed and a raspberry pi zero can run clipper just fine even on advanced printers but with my raspberry pi zeros controlling printers over uart which is an even lower bandwidth interface there is zero issues with latency or bandwidth saturation so you have no worries about stalling out your printer by sending too many complex commands in a short period of time that can sometimes happen with octoprint sending g-code over usb for example so that's how clipper works why should you run it well running clipper has many features that can be advantageous to anyone who has a 3d printer i will include a link to the clipper website that does break down these into more further detail along with all the instructionals on the github however i'll go through and list some of the major features here on why you may want to run clipper on your printer whether you are building a new printer or flashing over an existing printer to the clipper firmware so one of the first things that i've already touched on it before is the fact that clipper can take older hardware and make it run at a much faster rate so for example an old 8-bit ram sport is capable of doing over a hundred thousand steps a second when running clipper as its firmware versus the meager approximately 10 000 that it can do on an 8-bit marlin installation and for modern 32-bit systems such as skrs and duet 2s you can potentially get over 600 000 steps per second now depending on your printer build and your slicer settings you may never need that high of a step rate however if you are running systems that have multiple steppers running at once such as on my voron v2s here where i have four z motors and then an xy an extruder when all those are running at once at high speeds those do push the step rates quite high also with some of the features that clipper has you're able to push your machine faster and harder than some other firmware so having that little bit of overhead there will definitely be advantageous now when it comes to setting up and configuring clipper it does have web interface capabilities whether through octoprint or standalone interfaces such as fluid or mainsail however i do recommend if you don't require any of the add-ons that octoprint has running one of the dedicated clipper interfaces at this time they both have roughly the similar features at this time both of those do have pretty much the same features and it's a kind of a personal preference on which one you go with but they both function exactly the same way and the major advantages are you are able to edit your configuration settings and firmware through their simple user interface through your web browser and for updating firmware on clipper it's simply a matter of adding or adjusting some commands to your configuration file saving and hitting the restart button so for example here on my ender 3 if i were to add a bed probe to it such as an inductive probe that plugged in through the existing z end stop i would simply have to just add some commands to my configuration saying that my end stop zed is now a probe and these are the parameters i wanted to run with and hit save restart and then i would have a bed probe now another great feature of clipper is multi-mcu support what this means is you can control as many controller boards as you can plug into a raspberry pi so when it comes to multi-mcu support with clipper i got this little demonstration set up here on how it could be a cool thing to use in your printer and why you may want to use it so let's just say for example this is a raspberry pi 3b it has four usb ports and my controller board here let's say it's running a core xy printer with a single z motor so you want to go ahead you want to try that three point bed leveling that's all the rays right now so unfortunately your controller board here isn't going to support two more z motors now with most standard firmwares you can only run as many steppers as there are on the controller board itself or you have to buy a specialized board with an expander board such as a duet with its expander or the gtr with its expander and those can be pricey options and they're not as common well with clipper you can just go ahead and plug in another controller board so i have this fly board here it supports four steppers so what you can do is simply flash firmware to it plug it into your raspberry pi and then you go into your configuration you assign it as a second controller board you put your three stepper drivers on it for your zed and now you have a controller board for your zed and a controller board for everything else and that's it you would just wire it in normally at that point now when it comes to special firmware settings that clipper employs the two most common ones are pressure advance and input shaper pressure advance is a way of calibrating your extruder to adjust flow based on the elasticity of filament and its compression within your bowden tube so for those running systems that have long bowden tube setups such as on my voron switch wire here or for those that want to maximize print quality of even standard direct feed setups being able to tune your pressure advance with a simple macro and test print in one or two prints is a welcomed feature and does lead to much better print quality now clipper marlin and reprap firmware all have pressure advance marlin calls it linear advance clipper though is the only one that has smooth pressure advance smooth pressure advance does not introduce any instantaneous extruder velocity changes smoother extruder movement improves overall print quality leaving prints with sharper corners and less oozing and it does avoid common pitfalls such as working in stealth chop mode where this can cause issues with linear advance in marlin for example now one feature that is specific to clipper itself is called input shaping now what input shaping is is being able to cancel out ringing in your printer from vibrations and what this allows you to do is run your printer at a higher acceleration setting than it used to be previously without any harmonics causing any ringing in details on your print now i can't accomplish this via two methods you can do a calibration print and manually go in and measure and adjust based on how the print turns out and using some calipers to measure out the defects another option though that clipper supports is actually attaching an accelerometer such as an adxl345 to your printer's tool head plugging that into your raspberry pi running a script that runs some various frequencies through your printer's movement and then using the measured output from that to adjust the settings to compensate for the vibrations induced by certain movements of the printer itself now a real world example of that my voronv 2.4 here does have input shaper enabled and tuned on it and i'm able to run at speeds up to five to six thousand acceleration and have the same quality that i was getting with speeds around two to three thousand acceleration now this allows your printer to run much faster and much more efficiently because it you're able to take advantage of faster mechanics without potentially having to deal with any of the downsides of printing faster such as ringing now other features that may entice you to use clipper as your firmware of choice it does run on python so being able to add features such as additional kinematic support for different styles of printer it's a relatively simple procedure as long as you know the math and you know how to program python it does have support for pt100 probes so the higher temperature more accurate bed and hotend probes are usable with clipper it has thermal runaway of course it supports all the common tmc stepper drivers through their various uart and spi controls it supports all the common bed probes such as the bl touch inductive probe it supports multiple tool heads such as idex printers and tool changing as well it understands g-code from all the common slicers now of course it also supports multiple styles of bed leveling such as bed mesh leveling or adjusting your gantry or bed level itself with multi-stepper systems and my favorite feature is the fact that it's constantly being developed and new things are constantly being added to it for example the accelerometer control has been a recent addition to it there's work on bringing plug-in support to clipper at this time there's two in development standalone interfaces to it and the whole environment is constantly evolving with new things being added to it regularly so as somebody who's been using clipper for over a year now being able to watch it grow and expand is something that is great to see and of course it is open source and there are a lot of community features in it as well now there are a few things you do need to keep in mind if you decide to run clipper as your firmware of choice for your printer now the main thing is you do need a separate board to plug into your controller board to run clipper now most people do use the raspberry pi and it is the board i recommend clipper can run on all the raspberry pi's in fact i have two printers here that run clipper on raspberry pi zeros these low power processors are great for running clipper by themselves as long as you do not need a webcam and you are using the standalone clipper interface octoprint can be a bit bloated for it and a webcam does have a tendency to bog it down but if you are looking for something to simply run the printer remotely and run clipper at the same time it does run fine on a raspberry pi zero you can of course also install it on any system that i believe can run linux so you could theoretically use like an old computer or some of the other system on it chips however it is much easier to install it on a raspberry pi as there's pre-made images to do that and by going to a more powerful system you don't really gain anything either for example my core xy printer here on a raspberry pi zero barely hits 20 cpu usage under full load while this printer is running so if you're not maxing out a raspberry pi zero you don't really need a beefy 200 system on a chip to run clipper now when it comes to controller board support for clipper it does support most common controller boards out there you can take a look at the clipper github to see if your specific printer or controller board does have an example configuration if it does not you can take a look and see if the mcu itself is supported with clipper that's the actual processor on your board if the processor is supported and you're able to flash to the board and you know the pin out of the board you are able to make a configuration for clipper so for example here my taller voron v2 here runs on a custom controller board developed a little while back called the taco raven a smaller one here v226 this guy runs on a duet 2. my switch wire has an skr 1.3 this has an skr mini v2 an skr mini v 1.2 and this ender 3 here is running the stock creality 4.2.2 controller board so clipper does support many different styles of mcu many different controller boards so if you are looking to install it in an existing system most common printers are already supported by clipper and do have example firmwares to help get you started the installation process on the ender 3 here is only about a 10 to 15 minute setup now unfortunately no firmware is perfect and there are some things that some people would consider downsides to running clipper as their firmware on their printer now the first thing that most people will encounter is the installation of clipper itself it has gotten much easier over time especially with the standalone images based on fluid and mainsail which installed to a sd card pretty much the same as octoprint does so if you can handle installing octoprint you should be able to install fluid or mainsail no problem now when it comes to setting up the firmware for the control board itself you do need to configure it specifically for the controller board you're going to be flashing it to via an ssh terminal so you do need to use something such as putty to ssh into your raspberry pi once clipper is installed and you are going to have to go through and adjust some settings now these settings are readily available for the most common controller boards out there so it's simply a matter of copy and pasting and selecting the settings it tells you to however you do need to generate that file and some controller boards such as the skr series or the controller board in the under 3 for example you do need to go back into the raspberry pi and pull a file off of it i use winscp for example and then take that file put it on an sd card and then flash it to the controller board so for those that have never used a terminal interface before or done some scripting so while it is relatively simple for the most part you're following instructions and just copying and pasting commands it can be daunting for those that have never done something like this before but if you are having trouble installing it there's plenty of guides out there there's a community as well you can reach out to now another thing is with the standalone clipper interfaces at this time there is no full plug-in support so if you do require a plug-in such as spaghetti detective or the time-lapse plug-in built into octoprint you are going to have to run octoprint to continue using that however you still can run clipper it's just going to be through octoprint you won't be able to use the standalone interfaces developed specifically for clipper now another issue that comes up quite often and this may be a minor issue for some or a major issue is screen support for clipper at this time clipper only supports screens such as the basic graphical interfaces such as the 12864 that is common with most 3d printers or any other display that plugs directly into the controller board itself and sends a signal to the controller board displays that run their own firmware such as the creality ender 3v2 display which runs its own firmware which sends commands to the controller board are not supported by clipper at this time now the panel do display is a little bit of an outlier this this display is common with duet printers and somebody has gone ahead and written a plug-in to let this communicate through the moonraker api that clipper uses so you can't control a printer with a panel do but for example at this time if you have say an ender 3v2 once you install clipper this screen you might as well take it off and put it on the shelf because the screen cannot talk to clipper now there is another option for those running clipper that do wish to have a touch screen on their printer and that is using clipper screen clipper screen is an in development add-on that gives you the ability to use a touch screen plugged into your raspberry pi to control your printer so i hope you found this video informative i wanted to put a video out there because i do constantly get questions about clipper itself and i felt like doing a quick breakdown of some of the key features of clipper why you may want to run it and some things to keep in mind would be quite beneficial if you do have any questions again ask them in the comments below if i need to i'll do a follow-up video on this subject now i have done clipper installs on my channel before i have a video on how to install mainsail and i've done it on streams multiple times but if you would like to see an installation video on the ender 3v2 itself let me know in the comments below if you like the content such as this make sure you hit that like button and if you want to see more like this as well make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you would like to support the things i do and support the channel there are links in the description as well so i hope you learned something new i hope you give clipper a try if you're interested in running it and as always thank you and have a nice day [Music] you

Channel: NERO 3D

Views: 99,554

Keywords: voron, voron design, v2, v2.4, v2.1, v24, v2.2, v2.0, vzero, v0, v1, serial, request, cereal, overview, intro, 3d, printer, 3d printer, corexy, core, xy, abs, enclosed, klipper, klipper3d, firmware, marlin, duet, install, inputshaper, input shaper, shaper, pressure advance, guide, about, klipper firmware, 3dprinter, hardware, config, configuration, setup, introduction, nero 3dp, nero3dp, clipper, rrf, reprapfirmware, rep rap firmware, printing, 3d printing

Id: iNHta6zljoM

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021