@Jason
I’m just getting my custom CoreXY printer working and did my first prints last night: the Benchy in the foreground of the picture below was my third print and I’m printing the latest Voron test cube right now:
The printer is a CoreXY configuration and consists of four Z axis drivers for autoleveling (“Quad Gantry Leveling” in KlipperSpeak), driven by an BTT Octopus V1.1 with TMC2209’s that also drives the A/B steppers which provide sensorless homing. The toolhead is controlled by a Mellow FLY SHT 42 board that controls the extruder (again a TMC2209) and hot end temperature as well as the fans and is connected to the Octopus by CAN, so only four wires from the Octopus to the toolhead.
I can load gcode, monitor print operation, configure/tweak the parameters from a web page as well as download them from a web browser without having to play around with Visual Studio and SD Cards.
I should point out that the only real tuning I’ve done before starting to print was to calibrate the extruder which was done through the printer’s Mainsail web page. Doing a mesh analysis of the flatness of the build surface requires a couple of mouse clicks and is built into Mainsail-Fluidd/Klipper as well.
With Klipper, I haven’t written one line of code and the amount of Raspberry Pi set up took less than ten minutes including building Klipper firmware images for the Octopus and FLY SHT boards. To be fair, this wasn’t the first printer I’ve set up on Klipper, but the first time I did it (for my Spare Parts Printer) it took less than a day to go through the process. Having a good understanding of the electronics involved is definitely a plus to customize your system but if you are familiar with 3D printers and different parts there are good config files that you can start with and support is amazing.
The only area where Klipper could be considered deficient is in the controller user interface - you’re limited to a 12864 display with text. The “KlipperScreen” software that runs on the Klipper host Raspberry Pi is as good as anything you’ll see with Marlin or RepRap and the Mainsail/Fluidd web pages provides very comprehensive operations and customization capabilities that can run on a local computer or your smartphone. Some people run Octoprint with Klipper, but I’m not really sure why other than they’re used to the application.
As I’ve always said, the online developer support is for people running genuine Klipper and not a forked version on something other than a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4. In these cases, the Klipper developers will politely not respond to queries and guide you to the manufacturers. That’s not good news for people running the Creality Sonic Pad (although I’m seeing Creality is starting to step up and support customers) or if you’re running a rPi “like” single board computer that requires a forked version of Klipper to run.
I have a bit of work to do (Cable management is something that should be obvious form the picture above) and there are a few things that need tweaking. I also want to look at changing the Toolhead controller to a BTT EBB 42 board as it has a built in ADXL345 so I can do acceleration tests (which is built into the Klipper infrastructure).
Working with Klipper makes setting up and tuning a printer a lot easier than working with something like Marlin and there’s an amazing amount of capabilities as well as support out there that are that will make your journey easier.
I highly recommend you take the time to look into it.
). Loaded up Klipper, Mainsail and Moonraker - no issues. Board is flashed and mainsail connects. Now the fun begins…