Finally got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 4. I installed MainsailOS and I followed this guide and got Klipper set up and running in a few hours.
I literally doubled my print speed in the slicer settings, which is giving me a 30-40% reduction in print times and the print quality is actually better at the same time... The only concern I have now is how the whole table vibrates when printing so fast 😅
Managing the printer through the moonraker interface on Mainsail is really nice. I also set up Obico for remote monitoring away from home with an old webcam.
The issues I had during setup were pretty few, but I'll list them here:
- The USB webcam I had did not work at all out of the box, but that was quickly fixed by installing Crowsnest - after install the camera (Logitech C270) was working perfectly
- After installing Crowsnest, the camera worked, but the web interface was no longer connecting to Klipper - I found out this was because I set up my Raspberry Pi with a non-default username, and the Crowsnest installation had apparently updated my moonraker.conf to look for Klipper in the default location. Just had to update
klippy_uds_address: /home/pi/printer_data/comms/klippy.sockto have my username instead ofpi - The last problem I have is that I'm having so much fun printing at turbo speed through the slick web interface that I'm burning through my filament too fast and I need to order more soon.
Next on the list is a Raspberry Pi cam (the Logitech C270 is on its last leg) and some LED lighting to get a better view of the prints.
It really feels like I got a whole new printer. I am really impressed with it and I would definitely recommend to anyone with a cheaper Marlin printer and at least a little bit of Linux experience.
The one thing I didn't like about klipper firmware on my CR-10 was the default filament runout setup. One of my first big prints (with expensive ApolloX filament) ran out. The default klipper setup waits something like an hour, with the hot end still hot, then completely shuts down.
So my home position was lost, and with a partial part on the plate, there was no way of re-homing, so it was a wasted part.
Make sure your filament runout timeout is set to 24 hours (and I think I might have made the temp lower so it didn't burn?)
I like klipper on mine, too. I do wish the default mesh would be loaded at startup, but it doesn't load any mesh. Which doesn't really matter, I guess. I have four build plates, three different styles, so I'm running bed levelling pretty much every print anyways.
Good tip - I don't have a runout sensor installed so I was not aware of this