Klipper and the RPI-zero, Low Cost Remote Printer Control!

so you're getting tired of constantly swapping sd cards to print something new and you're looking for a way to remotely control your printer you've also heard of this fancy new firmware called clipper and you want to give it a shot so you go out and you buy yourself a raspberry pi and of course you're going to have to hook that up to your printer with a usb cable and don't forget you need to power it but now you have an extra plug in the wall so you want you want a cleaner set up you want something that's fully internal while your printer has a power supply you can grab a buck converter of some sort you get some wiring some connectors and hey you might even need to solder as well oh don't forget your crimper too but what if i told you there's an even simpler solution and a cheaper solution what if i told you all you really needed to add was a raspberry pi zero and a single connector so starting off of course going with a full-size raspberry pi is a completely valid option it does have many advantages that this option unfortunately will be lacking in and we'll get into those details further but the solution we're going to be looking at today is a great low cost option for those that simply want to be able to control their printers over their home wireless network and for those doing small compact builds where prioritizing cable management and available space can be a benefit so let's start off by taking a look at the raspberry pi zero so the raspberry pi zero for those that are unfamiliar is lowest cost option in the raspberry pi family this is the raspberry pi zero w and you're going to want the w version because that one has the built-in wi-fi and it's also the slowest of the raspberry pi's and it's not recommended that you run octprint on a raspberry pi zero because it's so underpowered so we're not going to do that and what we will be doing is running a standalone clipper interface on the raspberry pi zero and this will let us negate the fact that this thing has a weaker processor and another thing that makes this possible is the fact that the raspberry pi zero with its low power draw enables you to power it off of most modern boards simply through an available 5 volt pin now there are a few things you have to keep in mind to make this work and the first thing is you need to be using a controller board with available uart pins now on the skr series of boards the easiest solution is simply to use the tft header on the board you have five volt ground tx and rx in one convenient package you do need to ensure and keep in mind that your board has the ability to deliver the required power for the raspberry pi however since most modern boards are capable of powering standalone lcd screens they should be okay if you are worried you can refer to your controller board's manufacturer to see if the board is capable of outputting the required amperage for raspberry pi zero now there are two downsides to the setup that you do have to keep in mind the first thing is since the raspberry pi zero is a low power board it doesn't have the raw power capable of handling most modern hd webcam streams unfortunately that is a limitation of the encoder and there's really no way to get around that you may be able to get by with a low power webcam running at a low resolution and frame rate however i do recommend simply running without a webcam this will make sure that you don't run any issues with power draw or over taxing your cpu midway through a print and having everything shut down and unfortunately another downside with this setup is since you will be using the tft header you unfortunately won't be able to connect a screen if it requires that connection now depending on your controller board you may have additional hookups that you can use for controller screen now the alternative is of course now that your printer can connect to the wi-fi and you can control it you can simply control it from your phone as long as you're connected through your home wi-fi network over the web interface so getting this set up is relatively simple you just need to find on your board where the available tx rx 5 volt and ground connectors are on your raspberry pi zero you just need to ensure that you have your gpio pins soldered on and you need to make a single cable now this cable right here i just made out of some spare cable i had laid around with four wires in it and what you do is you connect the five volt to the five volt the ground to the ground and you need to take your tx and your rx pins and you need to cross them so tx connects to rx and rx connects to tx if you connect tx to tx and rx to rx it will not communicate so once your cable is made up you can connect them and that's all you need to do now when it comes to mounting both of these you can get pretty creative and mount the raspberry pi as close as you want to your controller board as long as you have proper airflow this gives you a very tight convenient package for adding wi-fi control to an existing printer now another thing to keep in mind too is since you are communicating over uart you do want to try and keep this wire as short as possible just to prevent interference so now you can see how it's done let's go ahead and install this in the printer so we have my raspberry pi zero here i've gone ahead and mounted it to this mount here that i found on thingiverse a while back connecting my cable and we're going to go ahead and mount it in the printer and then we're going to take the other end of the connector ensure we have the right pins in the right order and we are going to connect it to the tft header in this case here this is my skr mini v2 and my voron v0 so the next step after you go ahead and do the hardware setup for this procedure is go ahead and create your sd card and move on to the software side of things and the first thing you're going to have to do is decide whether you want to run mainsail or fluid as your clipper interface now when it comes to choosing between mainsail and fluid at this point i won't recommend either or it comes down to personal preference they both pretty much have the same features at this date and time and they're both constantly adding features as development moves on with both honestly i would just say grab whichever one has the interface you like the most the installation procedure for both are pretty much the same so this guide works for both so in this case here we are going to be installing mainsail and the reason for that is i run mainsail and fluid on different machines this one is one of my main sail machines for testing and i'm going to keep it with mainsail so you're going to go ahead and download the latest version and then once that is done use bellona etcher to install it and afterwards the boot directory on the sd card should pop up now if this doesn't show up you may need to unplug and plug the sd card back in after that we're going to go down to the wpa supplicant section we're going to add our wi-fi information and ensure you put in your ssid here and your password and ensure that you delete the hashtags in front of it otherwise it's not going to work and if you are going to attempt to run a webcam i recommend that you go into the either the mainsail or fluid section here depending on which one you installed and you can adjust your webcam settings here i do highly recommend if you are going to attempt to run a webcam that you lower these settings as much as you're okay with and that is it for creating your sd card now we're going to go ahead and install this in our raspberry pi zero and we're going to go ahead and plug it in and connect to it over our home network now you should be able to connect to it over your home wi-fi at this point however you are going to have to go ahead and do some configuration through ssh to set up the uart connection before we go any further at this point so go ahead and launch your terminal of choice i'm using putty here and connect to your pi zero now the default login is pi and your default password is raspberry you can change those if you wish later on now once you're logged in you are going to have to modify some files through ssh and add some lines to certain things i will have all these steps below in the description it's mostly just copy pasting and deleting certain things so the first thing you're going to have to do is swap the gpio ports from bluetooth use so that they can be used for uart so it's a pseudo nano boot and then you scroll all the way to the very end of this you're gonna add the dt overlay line so copy it and then you can just hit right click to input it and then you hit control x to exit and then y to save and then hit enter the next thing is you need to disable the serial console so that's another pseudo command and what you're going to have to do is there's a section here called console equals serial 10 comma 115 200 you're going to delete that whole section right here so just basically start hitting delete and there you go that's it ctrl x hit y and enter next we're going to have to go into the raspberry config section and change some stuff there as well so go down to interface options p6 that's serial port select no and for would you like the serial port hardware to be enabled you hit yes at this point you can also change any other settings you wish to change then you finish and then it will reboot the pi and now after rebooting the raspberry pi you are going to have to make a new config file now there is a guide here for making the config file on the clipper website and we'll just follow that here you're going to have to go with the instructions for your specific board though for reference this is a skr mini v2 and it is mostly just copy and pasting commands make menu config now to ensure you are making it with the right settings go to the clipper github search for the config for your specific controller board and there should be a description at the top here that says what settings you need to have selected when you're making your mate config file and one thing you have to do now this is regardless of which board you're using you have to disable use usb for communication because we're no longer using usb for communication we're using uart you may need to adjust your serial port as well in this case you are too and then hit q to quit hit y to save and then make now because this is an skr board here i am going to have to pull the make file off of the raspberry pi i'm going to use winscp to do that and then i have to rename it to firmware.bin put it on the sd card that goes into the skr mini and then plug that back into the board and reset it and it's pie and raspberry okay let's go to clipper file go to out and then right here clipper bin this is the file you're going to need to pull off of it and you're going to want to rename that to firmware.bin lowercase then you're going to take your sd card out of your skr you're going to plug it into your computer you're going to delete the file that says firmware and you're going to copy the firmware bin onto it and then you're going to go ahead and plug the micro sd card back into the skr board an led might blink for a little bit sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't and then what you can do to check is by plugging the sd card back into your computer if the firmware dot bin is now simply called firmware all in capital letters you successfully flashed your board and there we go now we have the board flashed now we can go ahead and upload our configuration to the printer now i already had a configuration set up for this printer so i'm just going to go ahead and re-upload that now if this is a new build you are going to have to go ahead and set up your configuration for your new printer that is a separate video now we have our configuration uploaded now under your serial connection before where you would normally see the usb address you're going to try and use slash dev slash tty amao i'll have that in the description as well and this would be the most common serial address when connecting over uart so this should be the one that works so once you have that inputted there save and restart and there we go now depending on the version of clipper you're upgrading from if this is a new builder install you might have some random errors thrown up but as you can see here we are connected to the printer and the printer homes just fine because this is a config that we had previously used and there you have it that's how you set up a raspberry pi zero over a york connection to control your 3d printer and also run off your printer's controller board now i do actually have this setup functional in my voron v0 printer i also use the same setup in my banzai printer now another thing to keep in mind is controlling your mcu over uart can be advantageous on the larger size raspberry pi now i have this raspberry pi 3a here and it only comes with a single usb port now of course i could use a usb splitter so i could connect this to my printer's controller board over uart and then leave the available usb port for a webcam for example the only difference that you have to be aware of is you simply don't connect the 5 volt signal just the ground the tx and the rx pins and other than that the setup method is the same so i hope you found this video informative if you do have any questions as always ask them in the comments below if you like the video make sure you like that smash button and if you want to see more content such as this make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you like the content i produce and you would like to help support the channel there are options below in the description as well i hope you learned something new and as always thank you and have a nice day you

Channel: NERO 3D

Views: 39,875

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, uart, rpi, raspi, raspberry, raspberry pi, raspberrypi, zero, pizero, rpizero, rpi zero, rpi0, raspberry pi zero, octoprint, alternative, config, configure, fluidd, mainsail, fluidOS, mainsailOS, fluiddPi

Id: AtW3GqkKUz8

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021