I've been pointed at Klipper firmware by a friend,

I’ve been pointed at Klipper firmware by a friend, I have to say I’m highly impressed. It’s taken a few hours to get used to configuring it, but having a Linux based system such as a Raspi doing all the calculations and having the Arduino just processing the movements makes a hell if a lot if sense. Combine that with control from Octoprint and it’s a winning combination. Well worth looking into.

Been looking at it and seriously considering swapping a bot over. I’m really happy with the Duet / RepRapFirmware ecosystem though.

I’ve ended swapping over the 2 bots which were running Marlin. It’s fixed the majority of issues that I had from firmware and print quality is amazing.

@Ax_Smith-Laffin , what print quality issues in particular did you have that it fixed?

Does klipper support all of the modern features though? Auto leveling, filament detection etc.

@Sahil_Jain - No filament detection as yet, but you can set that up using macros. As for Auto Tramming, that’s there as well as a full delta calibration routine.

@Tim_Sills - One use case - I use S3D for slicing on one of the Marlin CoreXY printers the Combination of Marlin and S3D was causing slow downs and virtual stops both from SD and Streamed via Octoprint. Using Klipper on this printer has stopped this.

Print quality has improved immensely, I could never get Marlin’s Linear Advance right, whereas Klipper it is simple to configure, S3D’s wiping is no longer required.

Movement is smoother on both Klipper printers due to the strain of the calculations being taken off the Arduino MCU.

Just to name a few here. As a note, I’ve never been happy with Marlin, I find it convoluted to configure and having to upload firmware when a major change is an absolute pain.I have 5 printers, 3 Smoothie based and now 2 Klipper based. The Flat file configuration and ability to just change something in the file and restart the firmware in Klipper is a breath of fresh air for 8 bit MCUs,

If Klipper gets a few more devs behind it, I can see this outstripping Marlin by a long shot.

My only issue is that it still relies on a USB connection between the Rpi and mega. I keep getting stalled prints on octoprint with a USB cable so I just can’t rely on a USB cable for long duration prints .

@ekaggrat_singh_kalsi - assuming you’ve changed the cable, it’s possible that either your board has a bad serial bus or your pi does. I run 3 RasPis plus a Zbox to run 5 Octoprint instances and rarely have an issue. If you’re getting disconnects like that it may be worth looking at it further, it is totally possible to run 24 hour prints via USB serial and not have a problem

I think you have a bad serial bus or bad cable… I recently did a 160 hr print via octoprint.

Does Klipper have voltage control through firmware for tmc drivers?

@peter_rowser there is support for TMC2100

@Ax_Smith-Laffin you mean for TMC2130s I guess?
There’s a hole lot of SPI controlled options you can set for the 2130’s in Klipper

@Paul_Arnold 2100 series…

I like that it’s Python based. Will have to investigate further. Thanks.