Changing the makerbase controller to a raspberry pi

Klipperized SV07
1

Ok, I’m liking the SV07 plus with one exception….

The Makerbase board. This thing gets throttled due to temperature in a short amount of time, drops wifi connections all the time (the router is 30 feet away) and, I am not a big fan of not being able to perform security updates of the OS.

Sooooo….

I have a nice pi 4 that’s just sitting in my drawer. I’m new to klipper and I love it so far. Any one switched out the makerbase controller for a pi yet? I’d like to hear your experience, ideas, pros/cons on this.

2

i have done exactly that. in my case i killed my makerbase trying to do an upgrade to the wiring. main issue is that you need a screen if you want to keep that feature and you need to do some wiring to use the accelerometer for input shaping. other than that doing a standard klipper setup with kiauh was easy enough.

3

I have been looking at the btt of pi screen 7. I use a tablet for control mostly, but the convenience of a screen is nice…

Did you just copy over the sv07 config files and make the needed changes?

4

initially yes (you can find my slightly altered config here) but after i learnt a bit more about klipper i split the config up into multiple files to make things easier to manage (you can find that config here)

5

well, I still have a Pi 4 with touchscreen display in one of my drawers. And it looks like “connect the USB from the printer mainboard to it and be happy”.

@TomW1605 However, as you already did it, do you have some pointers about what to install on the Pi? Is there something like a ready image (like for octoprint)?

Thanks in advance

6

just install raspberry pi os lite (without the UI) then install Kiauh. you can use that to install all the standard klipper stuff (klipper, moonraker, fluidd, mainsail, KlipperScreen, etc). if there is anything else you want to install just follow the instructions provided by the devs.

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7

thanks, will try during the weekend :slight_smile:

8

I’ll give this a try. I like the idea of splitting the config file up. I’ll post the outcome on the thread to help others with this.

Thanks for your help!!

9

First try: Installed everything as you’ve said. Raspi OS, klipper, klipperscreen, moonraker, fluidd. Looks very nice on the display of the raspi.

But - there’s always a “but”: after connecting the raspi by USB with the printer (instead of the makerbase thing) and powering up both, the raspi could not connect to the printer.

I’ll go thru logfiles or such tomorrow. However, if there’s something obvious I’ve missed, pls give me a hint :slight_smile:

10

You need the device id. Here is the page from the klipper site. You will then add this to the printer config file.

https://www.klipper3d.org/FAQ.html

From that page:

Where’s my serial port?

The general way to find a USB serial port is to run ls /dev/serial/by-id/* from an ssh terminal on the host machine. It will likely produce output similar to the following:

/dev/serial/by-id/usb-1a86_USB2.0-Serial-if00-port0

The name found in the above command is stable and it is possible to use it in the config file and while flashing the micro-controller code. For example, a flash command might look similar to:

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11

well … obviously. Sometimes one can’t see the forest thru all the trees :-/ Thx!

12

Hey no problem at all. Hope that helped you.

13

Just to report:
after fixing the udev bug in bullseye (/dev/serial/by-id does not get populated - have to install udev from backports) and fiddling with the printer.cfg it works :slight_smile:
Just have to get used to use a pen on the HD touchscreen (using my fat fingers already lead to several emergency stops :frowning: ), the higher speed, temperature resilience, more RAM and the attached 256GB SSD (used as boot device, no need for pesky sd cards anymore) is totally worth it.

14

Thank you for the info, I’ll watch out for this. :+1:

15

Change over to the pad 7, works great! Been using it non stop for a week now…