3D Printering: Switch And Klip(per)

September 4, 2024 by Al Williams 13 Comments

Last time I tried to convince you that, if you haven’t already, you should try running your 3D printer with Klipper. There are several ways to actually make it work.

The first thing you need is something to run the Klipper host. Most people use a Raspberry Pi and if you already have one that runs OctoPrint, for example, you might well use it. Just tuck your SD card away in case you give up and install a fresh Linux system on a new card.

The Creality Sonic Pad has issues, but it does work.

However, a Pi isn’t your only option. You should be able to make it work on nearly anything that runs Linux. We’ve even seen it running on Windows under WSL. If you have an old laptop that can run Linux, that would work, too. We’ve even heard it works on a Chromebook.

The other option is to get a “pad.” Several vendors make touchscreens with some Linux single-board computer bundled together with Klipper preinstalled. For example, there is the Creality Sonic Pad, along with similar devices from other 3D printing companies.

If you decide to go that route, you might want to make sure it is easy to install your own software easily. Some pads, like the Creality unit, are notorious for having so much customization that they don’t lend themselves to upgrades unless they come from the manufacturer. In some cases, you can wipe out the stock firmware and install a normal operating system, but at that point, you could probably just buy a Pi and a touchscreen, right?

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3D Printering: Klipper, The Free 3D Printer Upgrade

August 29, 2024 by Al Williams 33 Comments

I have several 3D printers, and I’ve always been satisfied with using either Repetier or Marlin on all of them. There are a few other firmware versions that could run on my hardware, but those two have been all I’ve needed. Sure, it was painful for a while having to juggle features to fit the firmware image onto the smaller microcontroller boards. Now that Marlin supports big 32-bit boards however, that hasn’t been a problem. But recently, I’ve been on a program to switch everything to Klipper.

In this post, I’ll tell you why I did it and give you some data about why you might consider it, too.

The Landscape

Marlin is written in C and burned into a 3D printer’s flash memory. It does a lot. It receives G-code commands, interprets them, and translates them to meaningful actions on the hardware. Modern versions handle automatic transformations to account for lumpy beds, input shaping to reduce shaking, and linear advance to produce better prints.

It might seem simple to control a 3D printer, but there are lots of little details to take into account. For example, if you are moving the head between two XY coordinates and you expect a certain flow rate, then you have to figure out how fast to turn the steppers to get the right amount of plastic out over that time. You also may have to retract before you start a move, make sure temperatures are stable, and transform the actual coordinates based on bed leveling data. There’s a lot going on.

Klipper does the exact same job, but it does it differently. On the 3D printer board is a tiny piece of software that does very little. It’s a bit like a device driver for the printer. All by itself, it does nothing. But it can handle very basic commands that describe how to move the machine.

All the rest of the processing you expect to happen now runs on some Linux computer. That is very often a Raspberry Pi, but it could be a spare laptop, your desktop computer, or anything that will run a reasonable Linux install. Several vendors even sell single-board computers with touchscreens made specifically for running this part of Klipper.

However, even though a screen is nice, you don’t really need it. I’ll talk about that more later.

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G-code Goes Binary With Proposed New Format

November 28, 2023 by Donald Papp 66 Comments

G-code is effective, easily edited, and nearly ubiquitous when it comes to anything CNC. The format has many strengths, but space efficiency isn’t one of them. In fact, when it comes to 3D printing in particular file sizes can get awfully large. Partly to address this, Prusa have proposed a new .bgcode binary G-code format. You can read the specification of the new (and optional) format here.

The newest version of PrusaSlicer has support for .bgcode, and a utility to convert ASCII G-code to binary (and back) is in the File menu. Want to code an interface of your own? The libbgcode repository provides everything needed to flip .gcode to .bgcode (with a huge file size savings in the process) and vice versa in a way that preserves all aspects of the data. Need to hand-edit a binary G-code file? Convert it to ASCII G-code, make your changes, then flip it right back.

Prusa are not the only ones to notice that the space inefficiency of the G-code file format is not ideal in all situations. Heatshrink and MeatPack are two other solutions in this space with their own strong points. Handily, the command-line tool in libgcode can optionally apply Heatshrink compression or MeatPack encoding in the conversion process.

In a way, G-code is the assembly language of 3D printers. G-code files are normally created when slicing software processes a 3D model, but there are some interesting tricks to be done when G-code is created directly.

CNC Plus Microscope Plus Game Controller Equals Awesome

November 20, 2023 by Richard Baguley 4 Comments

What do you get if you strap a microscope onto a CNC and throw in a gaming controller? The answer, according to Reddit user [AskewedBox] is something kind of awesome: you get a microscope that can be controlled with the game controller for easier tracking of tiny creepy-crawlies.

[ASkewedBox] set up this interesting combination of devices, attaching their Adonostar AD246S microscope to the stage of a no-brand 1610 CNC bought off Amazon, then connected the CNC to a computer running Universal G-Code Sender. This great open source program takes the input from an Xbox game controller and uses it to jog the CNC.

With a bit of tweaking, the game controller can now move the microscope, so it can be used to track microbes and other small creatures as they wander around on the slide mounted below the microscope eating each other. The movement of this is surprisingly smooth: the small CNC and a well-mounted microscope means that there seems to be very little wobble or backlash as the microscope moves.

[Askewedbox] hasn’t finished yet, though: in the latest update, he adds a polarizing lens to the setup and mentions that he wants to add focus control to the system, which is controlled by a remote that comes with the microscope.

There are plenty of other things that could be added beyond that, though, such as auto pan and stitch for larger photos, auto focus stacking and perhaps even auto tracking using OpenCV to track the hideous tiny creatures that live in the microscopic realm. What would you do to make this even cooler?

Wood game piece being carved by a CNC mill with a hacked rotary axis

This $12 CNC Rotary Axis Will Make Your Head Spin

May 15, 2023 by Michael Shaub 19 Comments

[legolor] brings us a great, cheap rotary axis to add to your small 3 axis CNC mills. How are you going to generate G-Code for this 4th axis? That’s the great part, and the hack, that [legolor] really just swapped the Y axis for the rotation. To finish the workflow and keep things ~~cheap~~ accessible to all there’s a great trick to “unwrap” your 3D model so your CAM software of choice thinks it’s still using a linear Y axis and keeps your existing workflow largely intact. While this requires an extra step in Blender to do the unwrapping, we love the way this hack changes as little of the rest of your process as possible. The Blender script might be useful for many other purposes too.

The results speak for themselves too! We thought the 3D printed parts were suspect in a CNC setup, but for the small scale of game pieces and milling wood, the setup is stable enough to produce a surprisingly accurate and detailed finish. If you want to try the same approach with something larger or a tougher material, [legolor] has a suggestion of a tailstock setup that’s still under $100 USD. Continue reading “This $12 CNC Rotary Axis Will Make Your Head Spin” →

Speak To The Machine

January 28, 2023 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

If you own a 3D printer, CNC router, or basically anything else that makes coordinated movements with a bunch of stepper motors, chances are good that it speaks G-code. Do you?

If you were a CNC machinist back in the 1980’s, chances are very good that you’d be fluent in the language, and maybe even a couple different machines’ specialized dialects. But higher level abstractions pretty quickly took over the CAM landscape, and knowing how to navigate GUIs and do CAD became more relevant than knowing how to move the machine around by typing.

a Reprap Darwin — Reprap Darwin: it was horrible, but it was awesome.

Strangely enough, I learned G-code in 2010, as the RepRap Darwin that my hackerspace needed some human wranglers. If you want to print out a 3D design today, you have a wealth of convenient slicers that’ll turn abstract geometry into G-code, but back in the day, all we had was a mess of Python scripts. Given the state of things, it was worth learning a little G-code, because even if you just wanted to print something out, it was far from plug-and-play.

For instance, it was far easier to just edit the M104 value than to change the temperature and re-slice the whole thing, which could take an appreciable amount of time back then. Honestly, we were all working on the printers as much as we were printing. Knowing how to whip up some quick bed-levelling test scripts and/or demo objects in G-code was just plain handy. And of course the people writing or tweaking the slicers had to know how to talk directly to the machine.

Even today, I think it’s useful to be able to speak to the machine in its native language. Case in point: the el-quicko pen-plotter I whipped together two weekends ago was actually to play around with Logo, the turtle language, with my son. It didn’t take me more than an hour or so to whip up a trivial Logo-alike (in Python) for the CNC: pen-up, pen-down, forward, turn, repeat, and subroutine definitions. Translating this all to machine moves was actually super simple, and we had a great time live-drawing with the machine.

So if you want to code for your machine, you’ll need to speak its language. A slicer is great for the one thing it does – turning an STL into G-code, but if you want to do anything a little more bespoke, you should learn G-code. And if you’ve got a 3D printer kicking around, certainly if it runs Marlin or similar firmware, you’ve got the ideal platform for exploration.

Does anyone else still play with G-code?

Motorized Camera Mount Was Once A 3D Printer

August 17, 2022 by Sven Gregori 1 Comment

If you plan on building your own motorized camera mount, a 3D printer can definitely be of help. But in this case, [dslrdiy] didn’t use it for printing out parts — finding himself with little use for an old printer built from scrap back in the day, he decided to repurpose it and turn it into a remote controlled DSLR camera mount that’s capable of panning, tilting, and sliding.

The main goal was to not only salvage the stepper motors and controller board, in this case an Arduino Mega 2560 with RAMPS board, but also to keep the original firmware itself in use. For this to work, [dslrdiy] redesigned the mechanical parts that would allow him to perform the different camera movements using regular G-Code instructions operating the X, Y, and Z axes to pan, tilt, and slide respectively.

The G-Code instructions themselves are sent via UART by an accompanying control box housing an ESP32. This allows the camera mount to operated by either via joystick and buttons, or via serial Bluetooth connection, for example from a phone. The ESP32 system also allows to set predefined positions to move to, along with speed and other motor tweaks. You can see it all demonstrated in the video after the break.

While there’s simpler solutions for camera mounts out there, this is certainly an interesting approach. It also shows just how far desktop 3D printers have come if we already find the older generations repurposed like this. For more of [dslrdiy]’s work with 3D printers and cameras, check out his customizable lens caps.

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