Klipper interfaces: Step by step guide to 3.5 options

if you've converted your printer to clipper firmware you're probably looking for an interface to control it today we're going to explore three and a half options for doing just that [Music] this video is the latest in a series where i'm trying to demystify converting your 3d printer to clipper firmware previously i made two sister videos on the main install structured the same so you can switch between the two one covered a delta with a 32-bit main board and use octoprint as the web ui the other a cartesian bedslinger with an 8-bit main board feel touch and fluid as a web ui whatever your setup clipper adds web control to the printer but this video is about adding a control interface to the actual printer we've got three and a half options to cover so we'll start with the half option 0.5 is to run the machine headless after converting both of these machines the existing touchscreen interfaces were both useless so our first option is to simply say goodbye to them unplugging them so they're blank and just not having an interface on the printer it's kind of hard to know what to show here because going headless means you don't actually have anything on the printer so we'll just move on the proper option one is to recycle an old phone or tablet as your touch display maybe you're someone that has an old phone or tablet sitting around doing absolutely nothing if you're able to design and print a custom mount for it it can be a great interface for your machine if you're running fluid or mainsail simply enter the printer's ip address in the browser and you'll have a full featured display and if you're running octoprint as your web ui you'll find a number of free apps available including this one called octoapp which is linked in the description clearly this won't apply to everyone but if you do have an old phone or tablet gathering dust it is a free and effective solution for adding a powerful interface to your clipper setup this option requires the least amount of setup and is potentially free if you have a device sitting around but what if instead you want to reuse your existing printer lcd option 2 is free in many cases and it involves retaining your original lcd although touch screens are starting to become more popular on new 3d printers the lcd and click knob combination has been the interface of choice on 3d printers for many years now clipper is compatible with a range of these be it the shorter ones as used on prusa or the taller full graphic reprap displays including the creality single ribbon cable version you can even use a big treetech tft-35 but only in the lcd emulator mode as the big3tech touch mode won't be compatible these displays are typically connected to the main board with a grey ribbon cable into expansion ports so the first thing we need to do is add to our printer configuration the pins for those ports in the clipper configs on github you'll find basic configurations for a number of different main boards on the super racer i'm using a big treetech skr version 1.3 so all i had to do was scroll to the relevant section copy all of the pins and then paste them into my own config let's say instead you had a rambo board we simply open that file and copy and paste the pins from there if your board isn't listed your actual printer might be listed instead for instance an ender 3 has an example configuration and the whole display section is already there with the correct pins to copy and paste now that our expansion pins are mapped we come to the sample lcd configuration file and we scroll down reading the labels of the available options until we match our particular display in my case i'm recycling a coriality full graphics display i'm not interested in the beeper but for the rest i simply copy and paste it in right next to my board pins save the configuration to restart the firmware and you'll hopefully find that you now have a clipper interface on your lcd what you're seeing here is the default options with controls for octoprint to resume or stop printing manual controls for the printer including homing and moving individual axes and temperature and filament menus which will allow you to control the nozzle the bed and the extruder for loading and unloading filament there's also a setup menu down the bottom with handy options such as pid tuning that's the baseline setup but how do we add custom menus and commands i wanted to be able to start and finish prints from the lcd and to achieve that i added the virtual sd card section in my printer config and set the path to the default octaprint folder you should now find in the main menu an sd card option in here all of the files that you've uploaded to your web interface will be available to start printing so what about if we want to add our own custom menus and items in the clipper config reference there is a menu section that guides you through doing this the other reference that i've linked is the default menu configuration file by viewing this you can see how the config needs to be structured to create the default menu and you can use that as a guide for adding your own items to add a custom menu we come back to our printer configuration file the command we need is menu and then we reference our menu structure by putting a double underscore in front of the menu names we can see clipper already has a menu setup called main so by including menu main and then my custom entry i ensure that it's going to go inside the main menu let's say i instead wanted it to be inside the tune menu i would simply copy that add it in the middle and then my custom menu will appear under main and then tune to tell clipper this is a menu we tell it the type is a list and whatever we put after name will be what actually displays on the lcd that will give us our custom menu so now let's add something to it to do this i've added to my configuration another menu command i followed the same structure telling it it's in main custom and then i've called this one message the term we put inside the square brackets is for the internal clipper reference whereas whatever we put next a name is what will actually appear in the menu instead of the type being a list the type is now a command and the only other thing we need is to enter the g code we want it to run in this case i'm using m117 which displays messages to the lcd and i put the message in as a message so let's save and restart the firmware and then enter our custom menu where we can see our command is there labeled do something as we entered we can press to run the command and when we return to the status screen our message is on display you can substitute in whatever gcode you want here whether it be regular or a macro here i've updated my menu item to instead test probe accuracy it appears in the same place as before inside my custom menu it's got my updated label and when i press the button my sequence runs as intended one more link i put in the description is to the commands templates reference it covers examples of how to use variables and it also covers things like menu styling before we move on if you're like me you'll need to find a way to mount the lcd as a basis i was keen to use this controller case by mighty nozzle i then saw there was a remix to suit the particular creality lcd and after printing this i hot glued in a piece of metal and that's because the standard touchscreen was on this magnetic mount i thought it would be good to reuse this system but the cable plus the way stopped it from sitting properly so instead i printed this little cradle which is bulky but gives similar functionality let's continue on to our third and final option the last option and my favorite of those i've tested is a touch screen running the clipper screen software clipper screen is going to give us a touch screen interface but with some clipper-friendly additions such as macros and the ability to shut down or restart the raspberry pi clipper screen has a github page and that links through to all of the documentation the first thing we need to discuss is hardware many touch screens are compatible and if we click through to the forum we have a list of touch screens that are verified to work and i didn't pick any of them instead going for this hyper pixel 4 with the attraction for me being that it sat on top of the pi like a hat and also that the size match the original creality touch screen the hyper pixel 4 has a github but there's a more complete set of instructions on a pumeroni tutorial page that will take us through the physical and software side of the setup the hyperpixel comes in a very attractive box and inside this premium packaging will find the actual screen as well as the required mounting hardware as previously mentioned this screen sits on top of the pi like a hat so we put in the extension then screw in the standoffs followed by plugging in the raspberry pi it's important to protect the screen by putting it flat on something like cardboard we finish up by inserting four screws to hold everything together we can now power up the pi wait for it to boot and open up putty the installation is predominantly done by a single script so we copy it from the browser and then right click in putty to paste before hitting enter this will download the required software and will be prompted with questions along the way the main one to get right is what model raspberry pi you're using as well as the type of screen here you're seeing me pick option 1 but i later found out it's better to pick option 2 for experimental touch fix a little while later the script completed and i hit yes to reboot the pie as the pie restarted the screen came to life but it also got stuck on a login prompt now we're back on the clipper screen documentation and we're going to copy and paste into putty to run the raspberry pi config we want to select system options boot auto login and then the option for console auto login automatically logged in as pi user we can exit the menu go to finish and then we'll be prompted to reboot which we'll accept the next part of the instructions take us through installing clipper which we've already done so we'll move straight on to copying these lines into our moonraker configuration in fluid this will be listed under configuration files and we're going to edit it adding in the trusted client of 127.0.0.1 we then copy the update manager section from the web page come to the bottom of the file paste it in and then save and restart after the pie has finished rebooting we're going to return to our instructions and copy and paste the lines one at a time to install clipper screen remember that to paste from the clipboard in putty we simply need to right click on the screen the final line is the actual install script and you'll need to wait several minutes for this to complete i actually had an error the first time i ran the script but when i repeated it and rebooted the pi clipper screen was installed and working albeit in portrait instead of landscape and without any touch functionality at this point the clipper screen software is actually installed and working so we just need to tweak the hyperpixel settings to get everything 100 for rotating the screen all of the directions on the github actually just through errors but after a lot of searching in the issue section i found a thread where gadgetoid was my hero to fix rotation on a pi 4b we need to edit a file with putty we'll enter sudo nano and then copy the address boot config.txt at the bottom of this file under pi4 and all we need to comment out two lines by adding a hash at the start and that is any lines with dt overlay equals vc4 and so forth after this ctrl x to exit pressing y to save if prompted with this pi 4b fix applied we can now return to the instructions on the front page of the github coming down to the section called persisting rotation once again in putty we'll enter sudo nano and then copy in the address all i've done is copy in this passage of text with the lower part rotating the screen and the upper part rotating the touchscreen input again control x to exit y to save if prompted and then we reboot the pi that part was definitely a bit of a hassle but in my opinion the result is well worth it i would describe clipper screen as fully featured with all of the usual controls you would expect for homing controlling heaters and this includes both large buttons as well as the ability to input specific numbers we have manual controls for moving the printer around extruding and controlling the fan a proper terminal including a full keyboard so we can manually enter commands as we see fit a configuration page with options for bed leveling as well as a range of customizable settings for clipper screen and i love the fact it has an automatic screensaver where you can control the timeout on the main screen we have a handy shortcut to access our macros and one of my favorite parts is a system section where we can update the firmware and restart or shut down the pi without returning to our computer of course we also have controls for selecting and starting prints the final piece in this puzzle is the physical installation which in my case turned out way better than i expected after removing the creality touch screen i measured everything up and came up with this adapter bracket to hold the raspberry pi and new hyper pixel screen leaving some room for the ports and i designed in some oversized holes to give a little bit of play so the touch screen could be properly aligned to the frame after the adapter had been bolted in place to power the pi i cut up a usbc cable and wired it into a buck converter and i also experimented with connecting the pi to the main board directly and a shout out to manu7 irl for helping me with this and explaining why it wasn't possible without the pi gpio pins to get around this i created this weird adapter to rotate the mainboard 90 degrees and tilt it out of the way and with the help with this janky fan adapter i was able to package everything inside the casing of the cr-10 max no external wires and clip a screen as if it was supposed to be there from factory just quickly if you do want to retain your standard creality touchscreen desu has a fork of clipper as well as firmware for the touchscreen and this is linked in the description if you're planning a clipper install hopefully you've now got more of an idea of some of the printer interfaces available if you're already running clipper let me know which option you prefer or perhaps something i haven't covered here coming up in this series a macros pressure advance and input shaping tuning so until then thank you so much for watching and happy 3d printing g'day it's michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification if you really 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Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 142,571

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, klipper, firmware, marlin, lcd, 12864, encoder, configuration, setup, klipperscreen, klipper screen, hyperpixel, pimoroni, octoprint, fluidd, putty, ssh, how to, step by step, guide, tutorial, lesson, test, display, touch screen, tft, demonstration, app, android, creality, cr-10 max, delta, flsun, super racer, rat rig, v-core 3

Id: gYP2j-dUrBY

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021