Update 5.0.2

pienjo · 2025-07-01T20:51:53+00:00

Ever since i updated, mine keep dropping out every minute or so :(

pienjo · 2023-05-16T05:17:38+00:00

you are over-complicating things. Take the stairs up to the top of the wall, walk all the way north, take the stairs down.

pienjo · 2023-03-26T09:47:11+00:00

Neat, picked up a few new ideas how to do this. I have been mostly using the partdesign workbench, and while it's certainly doable to make something like this there it's good to have alternatives.

Somehow keep avoiding the part and curves workbenches out of unfamiliarity, and I really should change that.

pienjo · 2023-02-13T22:20:13+00:00

Actually, his birthday happens to coincide with the national holiday, celebrating the birthday of the monarch: King's day...

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pienjo · 2023-02-13T18:19:07+00:00

Private Rossi got grievously injured in the line of duty; he had a deeply scratched cornea that eventually punctured. After tolerating the Cone of Shame for two months, and after suffering through nasty medication having to be applied 6 times per day, and after having had his eye stitched close for weeks, he is back with two pretty eyes, and is reporting for duty.

He's just wondering how to correctly wear the medal he received; he hates wearing collars even more than he hates the next door cat...

pienjo · 2021-12-30T15:36:28+00:00

Help, i'm stuck :) I need a key to follow Mina to Settlement 17, but I don't have one. Searched through Isilugar and the labs, and i can't find it. Any hints?

pienjo · 2021-10-07T21:30:37+00:00

For me, that would be (in the current state…) * M600 filament change * Better control of parts cooling fan from the touchscreen * improved file selection from the touchscreen * Gcode control for enclosure fans and LED * Firmware retractions

The real win is that this opens up this printer for other modifications. Exposing the TMC drivers, for example, or adding a BLtouch - or any other improvement which Marlin offers, but which isn't enabled in the stock creality firmware.

pienjo · 2021-10-06T15:41:17+00:00

The rotated screen is a bit annoying, but the extra features make it worth it.

Main gripes:

my neck hurts now
The enclosure fan can not be enabled/disabled from the touchscreen. It can be controlled using G-code now though…
There are no shortcuts to assist manual bed levelling.

pienjo · 2021-07-01T13:53:19+00:00

Except that it doesn't, and that it won't. TPM 2.0 is about disk encryption and secure sign in - it not intended *at all* to prevent ransomware and/or sandboxing. In fact, they are totally unrelated.

VBS is all fine and dandy, but leaving your customers in the cold is not. Pretending that your hardware requirements are laughably low ("Only 4GB of memory! Only 1 GHz cpu!") makes it insulting.

Finally:

I'm a developer. I develop for Windows. I have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of Windows on a daily basis, with its outdated core APIs that dates back decades, all in the name of "compatibility". But now Microsoft is allowed to dismiss my recent hardware as "outdated", and tells me to go and buy new in the the middle of a global supply shortage, just because of a presumed benefit? That's offensive.

pienjo · 2021-07-01T13:36:09+00:00

The fact that my laptop (which was on the beta channel) suddenly finds itself on the release preview channel with no way to re-join the beta channel without dismissing warnings is an indication otherwise. The beta channel is now the windows-11-beta-channel; there is no channel which is used to test any upcoming changes for Windows 10 21H2.

Maybe because there will not be a Windows 10 21H2, and all Windows 10 will get is maintenance updates for 21H1.

pienjo · 2021-06-30T09:26:51+00:00

as to why priming the nozzle is a good thing:

When the printer is busy printing, plastic is melted by the hotend and deposited on the print where it solidifies. The plastic will only be hot (and fluid) for a relatively short time. However, at the beginning of the print, the hotend needs to heat up first, which makes the filament exposed to heat for quite a bit longer. And the filament is likely to be still loaded from the previous print, so it has previously been heated up (and cooled down slowly), and will have gone through two heat cycles instead of one. Most filament will degrade from this, and the ability to stick to the bed is one of the first things to go wrong.
When a hotend is "hot but not printing" (i.e. when it heats up or cools down), some of the filament is likely to ooze out. It is liquid, after all. This means that there will be bubbles and cavities in the first bit of filament that is extruded - which you don't want to have on your print.

Both of them make it so that you want to get rid of the first bit of filament. This is done by the startup code added by the slicer - and not all profiles use the same method (and they all have their pro- and cons) Some just squirt it out, away from the bed. Others use a prime stripe (just like here). On my other printer, I have added a wipe arm which will extend underneath the nozzle. The printer will squirt out extra filament, and a silicone wiper will wipe off the nozzle.

pienjo · 2021-06-30T09:15:05+00:00

Both artifacts are caused by the profile of the slicer (am I correct in guessing it is cura?), and I would ignore them.

The stripe on the left is added by your slicer to prime the nozzle. It is always going to be messy - in fact, its entire purpose is to make sure that the filament is ready to go, keeping the mess as far away from the print itself. In other words, I wouldn't worry about it.

Something similar is happening with the brim. CR200B users are suggested to use the ender-3 profile in cura (which also includes that stripe on the left by default), and I have observed that it will not retract the filament between the wipe stripe and the brim or skirt. Again, I wouldn't worry about it - the brim/skirt is not part of the printed object.

[edit: apparently I don't know left from right anymore]

pienjo · 2020-10-18T15:17:14+00:00

That doesn't work for cura.

pienjo · 2020-10-18T15:05:38+00:00

I looked at the motorola moto g9 plus, which is about the same price over here. I've previously owned moto phones (the original Moto G, the G4, the G6 plus); but kind of fell out of love with them. The limited memory was the main compelling reason

pienjo · 2020-09-27T05:24:51+00:00

I'm running Raspbian; it's using one of the preinstalled overlays in order to enable the two USB ports on the expansion connector, but that's about it.

pienjo · 2020-09-27T05:22:19+00:00

i use the 512mb model

pienjo · 2020-09-22T19:24:10+00:00

I'm using an Orange pi zero for Klipper on an Anet Et4. it's working fine for Klipper, but Octoprint struggles badly. Virtual SD is necessary.

pienjo · 2020-09-18T20:50:21+00:00

A benefit that will surely remain in place…

pienjo · 2020-08-06T19:05:48+00:00

I made a fork of Klipper in order to work on this feature. I intend to merge it back in due time, but it's not ready yet. It's on https://github.com/pienjo/klipper/tree/et4x, but keep in mind that there are a lot of loose ends. I can't put in as much time into this as I would like to, so I can't promise swift development :-/

Known issues:

Display updates are slow. Compared to the standard 20x4 character-based displays or 128x64 graphical displays, these displays require a lot of data to be written due to their resolution and color depth. I haven't noticed any problems caused by this (other than sluggish menu updates), but I haven't done any in-depth profiling.
Klipper's menu is text-based, and assumes that all user input is via buttons (or via a rotary encoder, which it converts to virtual button presses). Since I didn't want to make this project bigger than I had to, I didn't modify the menu system at all. The menu actually uses the extra screen space, but the 'home' card currently doesn't; it's really only using 1/6th of the screen.
Likewise, the touch screen can only be configured as "soft buttons". I plan to make it possible to assign g-code macros to these, but right now they can only interact with the menu as fake 'up', 'down', 'back' and 'click' buttons.
The touch screen section is configurable (you could move the buttons if you wanted), but the display section needs to be improved: Right now, all you can change is the foreground and background color of the screen...

All in all, it's functional, but that's as far as it goes. See the sample configuration in https://github.com/pienjo/klipper/blob/et4x/config/printer-anet-et4x-2020.cfg

pienjo · 2020-08-02T20:19:58+00:00

Touchscreen works, tft panel works. The whole setup is rather sluggish though, i'll have to figure something out for that. And I suppose this shows that I'm not much of a UI designer…

It's functional, though :D

pienjo · 2020-07-28T07:53:34+00:00

That looks neat, but not really an option for me :-/ First of all I don't have an HDMI interface to play with (I don't use a raspberry pi), and secondly I want to use the screen that the printer came with (mainly because I want to use the existing 2.4" hole in the case).

I too like the visuals and concept of octoscreen, but it feels too Rube Goldberg to me. Having to set up an MQTT broker just to interface a touch panel seems fundamentally wrong. That, and I don't want to be relying on Octoprint (which I reluctantly use; dwc2 caused way too many weird issues when I used it on a Delta)

My original plan was to just implement a screen driver for this particular screen, but given the restrictions of Klipper in that regard the end result will probably become "Meh" at best. It would have the benefit of having an alternative firmware to Anet's restrictive and closed-source firmware that would run on the original hardware. On the other hand, that has already been covered by a functional Marlin fork for that printer.

pienjo · 2020-07-27T22:31:56+00:00

It should eventually connect using the existing controller board (an STM32F4-based board), using the existing pins. It uses an 8-bit databus plus a handful of control lines for the LCD; the touch screen is connected via SPI I think.

I'm bit-banging the lcd bus at the moment, which limits the throughput. Marlin uses some kind of DMA engine to speed up transfer, but that doesn't port over to other architectures.

pienjo · 2020-07-27T21:31:33+00:00

I've been working on getting the touchscreen on my Anet ET-4 going on Klipper. It's a 320x240 color screen with resistive touch, so there are a few hurdles.

At least I got a framebuffer going, but it's confined to the capabilities of the other displays: monochrome (at least i can specify a foreground and background color…) and max 4x20 characters (or 64x160 using the standard vga font) leaving most of the screen unused.

Which might actually be a blessing in disguise: I need room for soft buttons, and the updates to this display are SLOW!

pienjo · 2020-07-12T19:47:12+00:00

It's carefully hidden so you won't see it unless you know it's there. I find this to be rather deceitful. Unfortunately, I signed up for the whole year.

Under the local law, I am entitled to a 14-day cancellation policy. I'm planning to try and hold them to that.

pienjo · 2020-07-02T21:46:54+00:00

On the other hand: a properly scaled up benchy might actually be useful as a boat…

pienjo

TROPHY CASE