I mentioned in my last video that I predict klipper will become the most
popular 3d printer firmware in 2023. So far that's looking to be true, and then some.
This is the Ender 5S1, and it doesn't run klipper.
Now it does.
And this is how, this is the creality sonic pad, which even though I'm about to have some...mild
configuration issues, even that aside, this is quite possibly the most beginner
friendly way to install and run klipper onto at least most creality printers.
Including Steve. Let's go.
If you want a review of the ender 5 S1, I guess those exist already in great numbers, there's
probably not much I can add. The highlights are the toolhead which is a combination of this,
the wiggly wavy hotend, more on that in a future video as I actually bought one,
and the sprite, which normally looks like this.. but in this case it's like this.
The ender 5S1 is actually a fairly decent printer though, but the interface is not
my favourite on it, so it won't hurt to swap the touch screen interface out for klipper.
Oh yeah, when you put klipper on pretty much any creality printer using the sonic pad,
the screen stops working, because you're controlling it now with the sonic pad.
So, the sonic pad is creality's offering in the increasing number of klipper based self
contained printer host tablets, thats essentially what it is,
if you imagine a raspberry pi and screen you're not far off.
It costs £170 in the UK although it's £140 right now, and let's unbox it...
..So when you turn the sonic pad on for the first time or until you set up a printer, you are faced
with a wizard that pretty much almost seamlessly guides you through adding any creality printer.
There is also an "other printer" which I dont recommend really until you're used
to the idiosyncracies of the device. So what I'm saying is you really should have
at least one creality printer to buy this. I feel like thats likely anyway...right?
You pick your printer and you're told what to do, and this is something I like, if you've installed
normal klipper then you would be expecting to have to make a serial connection and its
quite complicated, even reading the online documentation on how to do it is confusing,
and don't start heading to the comments, I've probably been using linux since before you were
born so I'm quite capable but it's not well documented for a beginner and for someone in
a hurry it's not great either. On the creality pad, you are just told to take the printer's
SD card and shove it into the bottom left port, and it flashes the klipper firmware,
for the printer, on to the sd card. Stick that in the printer, turn it on, hook up the cable and you
are literally done except for the config. As far as I know you
can't do this with vanilla klipper, and that would be really cool if you could.
This is all very well and good, but what happens when it doesn't work properly because
the config file has the bed dimensions wrong like it did for the ender 5 S1?
I don't entirely know how this happeend but I think creality probably needs to update it,
I'll upload a working config and link it below for you to use, its pretty easy to just exit
out of the wizard, fix the printer.cfg file in mainsail, and run the calibration again,
but it ruins the slick setup process somewhat. That said, for the other printers I set up,
the config was...mostly correct. This all goes back to what I was saying in the last klipper
review I did for the qidi printer, klipper is something that manufacturers are going to take
a while to get working well, there's teething issues. But if I may rant on that for a moment,
I believe that we shouldn't make a huge fuss about this, because if we rant and rave about
poor implementations of open source software that are a result of that software being complicated
and general purpose, then what are we going to win? Closed source functionally limited software.
That being said, trying out the config files before shipping them wouldn't hurt.
Anwyay, everything works fine, with the right config.
One of the things the sonic pad doesn't do in the setup wizard is run input shaping,
which you kind of need to. It's easy enough, just go through the menus until you find it,
attach the accelerometer, and it pretty much does itself.
Hello steve. I'm klippering steve because everyone has a steve, I don't know what the
most popular creality printer is, but it's got to be either steve or the original ender 3 or
its pro variant. They all run on the same hardware so testing a vanilla steve is kind of important.
Steve posed no problem. Kind of. You can choose a manual bed leveling steve or an abl steve,
I never got round to fitting a bltouch so I'm in manual steve mode, it works fine,
but if you want to add a z offset and save it, you'll get a crash. Again,
simple configuration error, simple one line fix. I'll document this and link it.
third up, ender 3, S1, plus. Creality sent me this a while back, its actually not a bad printer,
but its sort of an odd big ender 3 S1 with a non pei bed, and hasn't got the metal ptfe tube and
the user interface is frankly horrible, so it is in desperate need of klipper to fix that.
This one is also supported out of the box..pad.. and
this one actually was the easiest to get running, with zero issues at all I think.
You can control four printers, but if you do,
you have used all the ports up. And I wanted to try a camera.
As far as I can tell you can stick a camera into any of the unused ports,
I had port 4 empty so I used that. The first camera didn't work. Neither
did the one creality sent me, which was with the cloud box. It seems that the sonic pad,
weirdly, is very fussy for which cameras do work. There's a list, and I don't have any of those,
but I did just buy a logitech stream cam for my 2nd channel, lost in circuits, check it out if
you really like soldering irons...and the stream cam works fine, so I guess it just doesn't like
cheap webcams. The stream cam is a good choice actually, it works way better in low light.
So, the creality pad runs sorta normal ish klipper and you can use mainsail or fluiddddd with it and
it's pretty configurable, but it integrates very well with creality print, which is creality's
new slicer that they've been working on, if you use cura normally you'll find some parts, ahem,
quite familiar, no huge learning curve here, but the printing things screen actually ...I find that
pretty decent, they have made this pretty slick, so if you have multiple pads running multiple
printers this will make it a lot easier to manage, you don't have to use it, but you might prefer to.
Also for reference, if you want to add a non connected printer like the V400 I have,
you can do this in mainsail, it won't show up on the pad itself but you can
control it through mainsail, this is kinda how klipper hosts work,
you can remotely control any printer from any mainsail instance. If you wanted it to show
up on the screen though, you need it to be usb connected and configured through the pad itself.
So, what do I think about the sonic pad. I actually think it's fine. It seems to occupy
a nitch...niche...that I would call the "lazy capable" user. Meaning someone who would have
the skills to set up klipper from scratch if they spent a weekend learning how to. But doesn't want
to. Which is probably the most common type of user. So I think while the pad is appealing to
total beginners, when some config issue pops up, and it will, you have to be able to fix
that. People like me and probably you, we can google our way to solving that, but you have to
be prepared to do so. The sonic pad did get a lot of criticism when it first released, and I
think that might be a combination of things that have been solved, and issues you run into with bad
configuration, its a shame the on board configs aren't always correct, but it is what it is,
these are settings at the end of the day, the hardware seems fine. And overall,
fixing the issues the sonic pad throws at you is, in my opinion, a lot easier than trying to get
your head round the standard klipper installation method, including but not limited to trying to
figure out how to ls /dev/serial/by-id. I hope they simplify that process soon.
Anyway I think thats probably it for the sonic
pad. Comments below as always, and I will see you next time!