💾 Archived View for windle.io › logs › 19072021-3d_printer.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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I thought I'd use this time to document my setting up of both my 3D printers. The printers I have as follows
First things first, I've had the MINI since the beginning of the year and there wasn't much I needed/wanted to do with it, I did however know that I wanted to be able to 'view' & control it from remote parts of the house/world *note* don't ever leave a 3D printer to run without ever checking in on it! To do this I knew I needed a Raspberry PI luckily I had a few laying around, so off I went and downloaded and installed OctoPi/OctoPrint there was nothing special about this install just follow the instructions and away you go.
Next, I also wanted the ability to control the printer via touch, after doing some research I finally settled upon the HyperPixel 4.0. This is where things went a bit south! First after plugging in the screen I noticed smoke, so I immediately shut the power off and disconnected both the PI and the Hyperpixel, while scratching my head and trying to figure out what I did wrong, I started to look for the pin outs for both the PI 3 B+ and the Hyperpixel, I found that I accidentally plugged the ribbon cable in the wrong way around.
Okay, so no dramas there, just go buy another one. The second one arrived and this time I plugged it in the correct way! After installing all the drivers for the screen and rebooting the PI I was getting a back light blank screen, I tried many guides and nothing seemed to have worked, after a few hours of trying to get this screen to work I decided I'd just leave it as is for now.
A few days later I came back to the MINI, PI and HyperPixel to try and figure out what had just gone on and why it didn't work?!
At first I thought maybe it's a corrupt install of Octopi and the drivers, so, I reinstalled them both only for the same thing to happen. What could it be?
Turns out the pi had the GL driver enabled and the documents for the Hyperpixel do state that you should NOT use the GL drivers, fantastic! I turned them off via `raspi-config` and rebooted the pi. Now all was well I could see the PI boot via the Hyperpixel, one small issue, the orientation was wrong! Again going back to the install docs for the Hyperpixel showed how to correct the orientation.
If you're unsure how to change this, I've added screenshots below to help
hyperpixel-rotate (left|right|normal|up|down)
After doing that command, the pi tells you to reboot. After the reboot the screen is now in it's correct orientation.
So, when people ask about touchscreen abilities for octopi, most people will say Ocotodash or Octoscreen. I tried both and both didn't want to boot! I did find a solution but took a few hours to find, so I'll go with the following, that worked for me.
install desktop scripts/install-desktop
This takes a while, after it's completed you'll need to reboot the pi once again, using ssh it's a simple enough command to do. After the PI had rebooted, you'll find that you're logged into the desktop environment that got installed via the above command.
Next I choose to install Octodash, the first thing you MUST do before installing Octodash is to remove lightdm this can be achieved via
apt purge lightdm
After this reboot, I then logged into the PI via SSH, once in you can begin the Octodash install, it'll ask some basic questions if you're not sure just use the defaults. Take extra care when choosing the plugins, I choose to install them all, after that I just followed the on screen instructions and choose defaults. Octodash will reboot your PI at the end of the install (you'll get asked to do this) and if all has gone well, you'll see the octodash logo appear on the display! Congratulations you've installed it, now all you need to do is correct the X & Y axis for the touchscreen the documentation has instructions on how to do this, this will depend on which way you orientated your Hyperpixel.
If Octodash has failed to auto start, you might have to consult the documentation for your specific issue, in my case I followed the steps listed below.
This is my 3rd printer that I bought, I only bought this because I wanted a cheap introduction CoreXY since my other two printers are what's considered a 'traditional 3D printer' that you can buy off the shelf/amazon. If you're wondering what happened to my second printer which was a Anycubic Mega-S I sold it to a friend.
The X5SA Pro overall is a fairly decent printer with a fixer-upper type attitude to be taken towards it, luckily I enjoy tinkering. The firmware that comes on the X5SA is.. crap, like seriously just scrap it right away! After building the printer and making some upgrades to help stabilise the printer, you can find loads of examples laying around on Thingiverse, my next goal was to install either vanilla Marlin or Klipper. Both have their cons and pros, which I'm not going to get into now. I choose Klipper, since I'm a fan of the Voron Printers and I'm currently building myself a V0, I decided to install Klipper on the X5SA Pro.
The install of Klipper on the Tronxy X5SA Pro is really straight forward, all you need to do is connect the PI, run some terminal commands and then using a python script (which comes as part of the Klipper project) encrypt the file called 'klipper.bin' copy it across to the SD card of your printer, renaming it to update.bin (though I actually forget it's correct name, the Klipper docs tell you the correct name), turn the printer off, leave for a few seconds and then turn it back on. If you see that your display is blank and you've heard a couple of bleeps, it's safe to say that klipper is now installed on the printer, next you'll need to browse to the IP address of your PI. You have a choice of two front ends (maybe 3) Mainsail which I use or Fluidd, both are just as good as the other from what I can tell.
Since this was my first time with Klipper I decided that the X5SA Pro was an ideal candidate for experimenting, needless to say I'm half tempted to install Klipper and any printer I get from this point on!
With this printer I knew I needed a Raspberry PI, what I didn't want was yet another plug, so I bought myself a buck converter from
After grabbing some wiring and hooking both the buck convert and PI, I was really happy to see that the PI booted (the default X5SA Pro case is tight and very little room). Once I booted the printer and logged into the web interface, you're greeted with a couple of errors, the main one is the lack of a filename `printer.cfg` I copied the example config found in the Klipper repo and renamed it to `printer.cfg` as per the instructions, I then restarted the firmware and loaded a test print, which went really well considering I didn't have to do much in terms of configuring. Though this wasn't to last, there was/are some things I wanted/needed such as a way to load filament, a way to unload filament, etc, etc.
Soon after a few prints I decided there was somethings that I wanted to change, things like, Z Alignment, yes Klipper has gone Z-Tilt but if I'm honest I just haven't had the time yet to configure it. Rather than bore you with the details you can take a look at
Here you'll find some common macros and some defaults after doing the very minimum in terms of tuning.
Next for the X5SA Pro, is, to run some proper tuning, change out the motherboard for the BT SKR 1.4 Turbo, replace the hotend with the E3D V6, add some mosfets for both the heater bed & hotend.
After I've done these upgrades, this printer will become my 'goto' printer until such time I've built a large format printer using the Voron design.
