Klipper - Mainsail - Fluidd - 2022 - Chris's Basement

today we're going to continue on our journey with clipper firmware by taking a look at two options you have for your user interface [Music] hello everyone chris here and yesterday we're going to continue on with our clipper firmware series now these videos are aimed at the new clipper user someone that has pretty much zero experience running this type of firmware and in the first video we did a quick install of clipper alongside octoprint that's because octoprint has always kind of been the traditional user interface to run clipper now you don't necessarily need a ui to run clipper firmware but it does save you a lot of work on the command line and there are two versions of user interface out now that have become very popular and that being mainsail and fluid so that's what we're going to do today we're going to run through these two options you have for user interface 4 clipper they are specifically designed to run clipper you don't need octoprint at all and the install is not going to be all that different from what we did in the original video with octoprint but there are a few things that change that you might need to know also this might be a new interface for you this might be the one that you want to go to permanently so we'll check them both out just to see what the differences might be so let's head to the computer take a little further look at mainsail and fluid so mainsail and fluid are going to be somewhat similar they do it different ways but they're going to offer the same set of features to ultimately control your 3d printer in fact they both kind of remind me of the duet dwc duet web controller they work pretty much the same way they're going to give you remote access to clipper and ultimately your 3d printer it's important to note that there's a lot of information about both of these open source projects out here on the internet and they are intended initially to run on a raspberry pi as an image that's not saying you can't run them on other things in fact we're going to jump into that in later videos but for this video there will be a raspberry pi involved now of the two mainsail and fluid mainsail is actually a little bit easier to install in my opinion but that's only because mainsail is currently available in the raspberry pi imager tool so that's where we're going to start so the raspberry pi tool is what i've been using a lot lately for doing a lot of my different image installs but from here you can just do choose os other specific purpose os's 3d printing and there's one for mainsail and you can see there's a couple of pieces involved here clipper moonraker and mainsail we'll choose our storage pretty much any sd card is going to work the raspberry pi image tools should take care of that device no need to format it it'll handle all of that and using this tool you probably want to go ahead and set up a couple of things before you write it you can do that in your settings right here since i only have one install of mainsail i'm just going to change the hostname to the raspberry pi to mainsail this will allow us to access our mainsail install from the url bar mainsail dot local we'll see that more in a moment we do have to enable ssh because we are going to have to get in command line to set things up set your username and password i usually just use the default with pi as the user password raspberry just so i can keep it straight and then you need to configure your wi-fi just enter your network name and your password remember those are case sensitive and you can always set your location settings i am in the central time zone down here i usually just go with defaults eject it when it's done enable telemetry doesn't really matter for this install but you can just save it and with those settings set when you write your image all of that's going to be set up for you you don't have to edit any files manually so let's go ahead and write remember it is going to delete everything on that sd card that you're going to use now while our main cell image is writing we do have to go out and actually get a copy of fluid so that we can write the image it's not included in this tool yet but it probably will be at some point so we'll go to the fluid site and all the information you need to install it is here you can just go to installation and we're going to use the fluid pi image you can see they even have a docker image for this so you can install that on pretty much anything you wanted but today we're focused on the pie so we'll go to fluid pie you can click here to get the latest release that's going to take you to github and we just need this fluid pi r pi light you can just click on this file and that'll start the download once your download is complete you can just right click extract all this file is pretty good size so be careful of that but once this is extracted then we'll have an image where we can use fluid as well the mainsail image is almost done we'll start with mainsail first and since we've baked all that information into our image with the settings tab we can just mount our sd card on our pi and power up and it should join our network and once the boot up has completed like i showed you when we created the image you can just go to its dot local address since we called it mainsail we can go to mainsail.local and mainsail is up and ready to go now you can see we have an error that's because we don't have a main board connected to our raspberry pi and we don't have a printer.cfg you're not going to get a printer configuration just by installing mainsail and you're not going to have clipper be flashed to your main board so we still have quite a bit of work to do but as far as the dashboard goes it's all here you've got your dashboard we'll see this more when we get connected up you've got your console you can talk to the main board via g-code or m-code commands it's going to give you some print statistics some history and then you have machine settings notice there is no printer.cfg in here we're going to have to build that ourselves but i wanted to mention all these different types of software that come with this mainsail install you can see there's an update manager so it doesn't know anything about clipper because there's no main board you have your main sale which is the ui what we're looking at here and then you have something called moon record you really don't need to worry about it so much but it's what connects this thing together from mainsail over to clipper it's the web server piece basically so just know there's a couple of pieces of software at play here that all work together to make mainsail and clipper work successfully together and here's where i think some misconceptions come into this configuration mainsail and fluid they're a nicer version of user interface that you can use to control a 3d printer that's running clipper but you still have to get clipper set up and you still have to have a printer config so from the first video when we installed clipper we flashed it onto the main board all that still has to be done if you haven't done it yet and yes you do have to go to the cli to do all of those functions and here's our example hardware configuration if you saw the last video this is exactly the same setup i was using i have our psu our big treetech mini e3 1.2 board it doesn't really matter what board you use most of them are going to work with clipper this is just the one that i grabbed all the settings are going to be slightly different depending on the mcu that the board has and i have a couple of 100k thermistors plugged into the board this is absolutely bare bones what you would have to have to troubleshoot a clipper config because if you don't have the thermistors or you don't have the power hooked up clipper is going to throw an error before it even gets started so you can't even tell what's going on as i've mentioned before i think it's a lot easier to go ahead and build your printer get everything plugged in and ready to go and then start troubleshooting clipper that way at least if clippers throwing errors you know it's something you need to act on and not something you don't have now from the last video this board does have clipper on it but i'm going to show you again that the process is the same no matter what ui you're using so a secondary sd card is going to be handy so you don't have to unmount the one on your raspberry pi now since we're going to have to go to the command line to actually get a clipper configuration file a bin file to put on our board before you do that it's probably important to be on the newest versions of all these different softwares mainsail moonraker and clipper so from your mainsail interface when you bring it up go ahead and just update all of these this will keep you from having to rework configuration with newer syntax or maybe they don't work the same as the old ones do just update all of this to the newest version you can do that with this command right down here it's going to go through a couple of things it takes some time but it's well worth your time to do this now rather than go to the cli and have to come back and rework things and now everything is up to date the most important one here is clipper because we're getting ready to flash it onto the board we want it to be the newest version possible and work well with mainsail if you have a problem with any of the updates using the update all button just go and do them manually one by one over here takes a little longer but it's not that big a deal so now let's move to putty get in command line and we'll build the firmware dot bin we're pretty much going to do the same exact thing as the previous video this time though we can use that dot local address mainsail dot local that we set up when we created this image and your user id and password are going to be whatever you set them to be in that image the default for raspberry pi is usually pi and raspberry and here we are in mainsail now really the only thing that mainsail is going to save you command line wise is having to do the get to grab clipper and doing the initial install if you do an ls right here in the home directory you can already see all the stuff for clippers here as well as all the supporting things from mainsail like the streamer to use your camera and storage for your g-code files so you don't have to do that step but we still do have to run a make on clipper to configure the type of board we use and get our bin file most os images nowadays on linux are going to have make already but you can go ahead and confirm that if you'd like do a sudo apt apt make install make and you need your root password which is also raspberry and makes already installed so that's confirmed and we're just going to change directory in the clipper we saw that before the main clipper directory you can take a look in there if you want but really we just want to run a make menu config just like we did in the first video and it's all the same options that we saw previously since we've already done this i'm just going to run through it really fast for our mini 1.2 board so we're going to enable extra low level configuration options we have to pick our chip type which is an stm32 we want to confirm the model ours is an f103 bootloader offset for this chip is 28k clock reference will stay at 8. we're going to use the usb interface again you'd only need to change this if you were going to use gpio and the one that's tricky for most boards is the gpio pins that are set at the start of that microcontroller so we're going to go into this one and for the mini 1.2 board we do an exclamation point pc13 it is a little different for each board so make sure you have this set correctly you can usually do a google search and find out what these pins are going to be and that's all we have to do we do a queue to quit hit yes to save it just hit our y now we can just run a make command to compile that's going to create our bin file clipper.bin has been created now to get that file you could dismount the raspberry pi sd card put it on your computer put it on another card whatever and change it over but when scp is the easiest to do so you don't have to turn off your pi and do all of that we did in the last video but you just pull up winscp create a new session it is scp your hostname again mainsail dot local and your username and password we can log in on the right your files on your raspberry pi the left the ones on your desktop so let's go into clipper out and here is our clipper.bin we can right click download and i'm just going to save it to my desktop then i'm going to go back to my file explorer here's our clipper.bin we need to rename that to firmware.bin and then we'll just copy it to the sd card we're going to use to load the firmware onto our main board i'm just going to delete the ones i already had in here from the last video and we'll paste in the new one right here if you already have firmware on your board you just want to try mainsail you don't need to do this step just make sure it's the same version as we just updated to so now we can remove the sd card load that sd card onto our main board and then power up it'll flash a few times when the firmware has been flashed and then i usually just like to reset the whole thing so power off and back on and then we'll be up on clipper now that clipper is running on our board we can go ahead and cable up usb to our raspberry pi and if you do an ls slash dev you're going to see serial that is our main board now if you have a problem with the serial option coming up go back make sure your menu config all those options are correct and also go ahead and reboot the pi just do a pseudo reboot that might make it start working if all else fails unplug everything reboot it bring it back up and that should fix the problem but from here this is going to get us our address of our board that we have to use in our printer config so if you do ls slash dev slash serial slash by dash id that will get your mcu address and again what i like to do is just bring that command back up up arrow i'm just going to enter usb and hit tab that's the whole address that gets you the whole line that you need for your configuration file and that's our next subject the configuration file so pretty much all this is recap from the first video whether you use mainsail octoprint or fluid it's going to be pretty close to the same thing you still have to create a printer.cfg file and that can be a lot of work but there are examples out here in mainsail and fluid that you can use for your 3d printer depending on what board you might have as always the internet is full of great examples that you can use to get you set up so let's just walk through those steps really quickly so now that we know our mcu id just go ahead and do an ls here again we're in the clipper directory you can see there's a config directory if you do an ls on config there are a ton of example cfg files you can pick one of these if you like or you can pick one that you found on the internet again voron has a lot of great ones they do have one for the generic e3 v.2 that we're using here so we can start with that if we'd like now because we have to go in and out of the linux file system to use these there's a couple different ways you can do it and these newer uis like main cell and fluid actually make it fairly easy you can just do it from the user interface so we don't have to do anything in here so back to the browser if you just go to machine you can select which directory you want to be in here's config examples your printer.cfg actually goes in config again we don't have one but back to examples you can pick any of these you wish you can see how many files per page here you can just scan through here's our 1.2 e3 config you can open that up and here's your configuration file i think it's just as easy to do a control a control c to select all and then copy and then you can close this go back to your config directory up here and i'm just going to create a new file create file printer dot cfg and i'm going to click on that file and paste in what i got out of that example and here's where your mcu serial comes in you need that device that we found over there in command line so back to putty remember we need this whole command here we'll just select that and then in our browser we'll just paste it right here in our configuration and the only thing i'm going to change in here is this is specific for a board for different thermistors i have the same thermistor on my hot end just a regular 100k this is the most common option we'll just copy that and we're going to paste it on the bed too because i know it's going to work and not throw as many errors as it would usually because we don't have anything plugged into this board it's trying to keep you safe so let's save and restart after the restart over here you can see our errors are gone it can actually see what version of clipper we're running on what mcu the dashboard is a lot more populated it's starting to read the thermistors you can control the printer it's throwing quite a few errors over here because we're missing things in the config but that's going to be a lot of detailed information that we're going to have to add and since this is a ui video there's one thing i can tell you to do as far as mainsail and fluid you need to include that specific config file in your printer.cfg you can see right here it says mainsail.config please include this in printer.cfg so if you go to machine you can see that mainsail.cfg it contains a lot of the devices that the dashboard is complaining about we just take a quick look at it virtual sd card pause resume all these things that it's complaining about are right here we just need to include it so we can close this go to our printer.cfg and just up here at the top in brackets do include mainsail dot cfg and just hit save and restart after the restart you can see we're talking again to the mcu that's how you know we're communicating with clipper go back to the dashboard a lot of those ugly errors are already gone so that is a great start from here you would work on your printer configuration set up your motors set up your steps if you have a probe all that good stuff that's going to be in a future video so there's mainsail it's set up and you can start using it again you have to set up that printer.cfg tailored towards your 3d printer we'll do that a lot later now let's jump to fluid it's not a lot different so we're going to go over it rather quickly but it does look a little different has a few different features now back to the beginning of the video when we downloaded fluid we just download that as a zip file you unpack it and there's an image file now fluid isn't necessarily in the raspberry pi imager tool but you can still use it you just have to use it as a custom image so we'll use custom and then we'll just navigate to downloads to our fluid file the dot img we'll open it up choose your storage we're just going to use that same sd card that we did with mainsail we'll overwrite it and all of the options that you have set in here are going to be valid with fluid as well i just changed local to fluid f l u i d and an extra d for uh extra duh whatever but then all these other things raspberry pi your your passwords for ssh and your wireless that's all going to be valid so just save that and hit right and again now that we have fluid installed on our sd card we can just put it on our pi boot up and then we can head over to the browser and you can use that dot local address fluid.local and here's fluid it has a lot of the same pieces that mainsail does it uses moonraker as its web server the layout's just a little bit different but you can get almost all the same tasks done and since we already have clipper installed on our main board we don't have to do it again i'm going to show you just because i want you to know that these are the same so with fluid just like mainsail or octoprint clipper is at its base so we're just going to open up the putty tool we're going to go to fluid.local and we're going to log in just like we did before and here's fluid again it's very similar you can do an ls there's your clipper file and all the supporting files we can change directory into clipper and to configure your firmware.bin file you need to compile it with make menu config and we set all the same things depending on the board you have stm32 103 28k bootloader your startup pin pc 13. cue to exit yes to save here i'm going to show you if you need to recompile you can always do a make clean that's going to clean up anything that might be already in there before you run your make and now you can just do the make again to generate your firmware.bin file and when that's done we use our winscp tool to grab that bin file the file structure is the same clipper out and there's clipper.bin we'll download it we'll copy it and paste it on our sd card just like before it will have to be named firmware.bin instead of clipper.ban then we can take our sd card back to our board mount it you can restart the board you can usually just use the switch it'll pull that in i usually like to reset it power it off power it on just to make sure it's reset but after that's been flashed then you can cable your board up to your raspberry pi usb clipper will be up and running the board's connected to the raspberry pi so now you can just do your ls slash dev serial is there that's what we're looking for because we need that id so ls slash dev slash serial slash by dash id there's our device i just do usb tab to get the whole device name you're going to need that in your printer config just like with the other two configs again just like we did in mainsail it's probably a great idea to go ahead and do your updates before you create your firmware.bin file just to make sure it's on all the newest versions you don't want to have to reflash it later if you don't have to so in fluid to do that you just come down here to the cog settings and then you have some tabbed out options here go to software updates and just anything that needs to be updated go ahead and update it we can do fluid we'll do clipper and moonraker now everything's up to date and just like before to make clipper work no matter what ui you're using you need a printer.cfg file but just like in mainsail you can do it all from here and use an example config if you wish over to the side go to configuration here's your file editor and this one you don't need to go up to the other directories to get it you actually have a config examples over here there's a lot of different ones if you want to use the example just get the one that's closest to the board that you're currently using by the way all of these usually have information about how to set up the board so if you don't have the options to flash your firmware come to the example configs they might have all the information you need for example here's what to set the bootloader to and what your microcontroller's startup pin is going to be so just take that into account but again i'm just going to select all control a ctrl c to copy it and then over here just create a new file just like we did before add file printer dot cfg open it up and ctrl v to paste everything in just like i told you with mainsail fluid also needs you to include their configuration file so just do a bracket include fluid dot cfg close bracket that's going to save you from a lot of errors when you first start up and of course we also do need our dev name that usb name that we got from command line so our mcu serial so scroll down mcu back to putty this whole line right here config file just over paste this line now we can save and restart and it looks like moonraker has thrown a bunch of errors of course i would expect some errors but this looks to be something down in the os that doesn't like something about how it was configured we can head here to this dock to read more on it it looks like the user needs to be granted no password so it needs a little higher level of permission to do what it needs to do it looks like you can just install a policy kit run a script to get rid of these so let's do it real quick just for fun there's just three line commands here you still have putty open we're just going to change directory over to the scripts run our set policy kit rules script as root and then run the service command to restart moonraker then we'll head back to the browser and it looks like that script did a quick update and took care of all of our errors so we're good to go there again here's where you would start custom tailoring your printer.config file now there is one more thing i wanted to touch on before we end today and that's with cameras both fluid and mainsail have pretty good implementations of how you use your webcam so i'm just going to plug in a webcam i have here just for an example we'll point it at the wall over here and these both use m jpeg streamer just like octoprint does now on both mainsail and fluid your camera is just going to be a widget on your dashboard here but it might not come up automatically so in fluid just go over here back to settings and go to cameras and when they come up by default they usually have this little sign on there there's an error just click on it and hit enable hit save back to the dashboard there's your camera right here on the main page both implementations are very smooth you can even set up multiple cameras in main cell and fluid very easy to use so there it is mainsail and fluid and how you can use them both to control your 3d printer running clipper and as of right now i've used them both some i really can't find any features that are better in one or the other i think it's really a matter of preference at this point both of them are being actively developed i think they're both pretty easy to use and even if one has a feature the other one doesn't soon the other one will catch up it's really not that big a deal so try them both they're both free and they install pretty much exactly the same way let me know which one you like best in the comments so hopefully you found this helpful we do have a lot more videos to come the next one will be configuring your 3d printer to use clipper no matter what ui you're going to use that's it for today and i'll see you really soon on the next one

Channel: Chris Riley

Views: 68,701

Keywords: 3D, printer, Printing, 3D Printing, 3D Printer, ChrisBasement, ChrissBasement, Chris'sBasement, Chris Basement, Chriss Basement, Chris's Basement, ChrisRiley, Chris Riley, benchy, 3dbenchy, 3d, Klipper 2022, Mainsail, Fluidd, Image Creation

Id: FjMZzW_WVQ8

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2022