I feel you - but really it isn’t that hard to do.
Can you solder? Like a bit, in terms of connecting wires to each other? If not, that’s a good excercise.
You could use button connectors as well, but I personally prefer a more solid connection.
You only have to pay attention to get the correct pins from those stock connectors, but due to the pinout schemes it’s not that complicated as well. To not mess anything up, I put labels to all wires before actually connecting anything, that helped me a lot to not get confused.
The only things you probably could fry are the MKS board and/or the PCB of the head. You can get both the MKS and a complete printhead for ~25€ at AliEx tho, and even IF you really fry the head’s PCB, you can still use the other parts of it later for spare sparts.
Imho it’s really worth the ‘risk’, but as I said, if you pay attention and follow my wiring, there isn’t really a risk anyway…
Just don’t rush anything and double-/triple-check everything when connecting and before powering it up.
Feel free to reach out directly via email (address is in the footer of the page) at any time - if I can help, I will.
Hey, thanks for all the work that you have put into this! I recently got a refurbished Kobra 2 Max to use for large cosplay prints. While I personally have not had much issue with it’s stock performance, I have been interested in going to pure Klipper in order to try out adding other projects like the ERCF v2 for multicolor prints.
Thankfully, I have a MKS Eagle lying around, which is very similar to the Robin v3 you used (the main difference is that it has motor drivers built in rather than removable ICs), so after reading through your docs, I think I’ll give it a shot one of these weekends when I feel like doing a bunch of crimping
If you get it up&running and have a working printer.cfg, it would be great if you’d reach out, so that I could maybe add it to the infosites as another example and the cfg to my GH repo then as well.
And please reach out as well if you manage to get the ERCF v2 running! That would be really interesting and a great addition as well!
Hello all, I’ve finally checked and rechecked my wirings and crimps and the klipperized K2Pro works (some teething issues still). Pretty much followed the description made by @Catnippr, all though I did design my own enclosure. Once I’m happy with my printer.cfg I’ll post it.
I just got all the plugs on order. Thinking about modeling that really weird hard to get plug when it gets here to see if it’s 3d printable. A prebuilt/cheap wiring harness might get more people abandoning the crapshoot that is the anycubic board. Is there a company that would make you something like this if given the specs? I’ve seen companies that do custom PCBs with just specs.
It’s a nice idea, but you’d still need those metal pins for the actual contacts. I personally wouldn’t make the effort, and I actually doubt that the price would be somewhat reasonable IF you’d find a company that would make those connectors. If you’re in the US, you can find those PHB 2.0 connectors at Amazon, here in Germany I didn’t find them at all and had to order at AliEx.
But tbh, I think the easiest way would be to just snip off those stock connectors and either crimp the XH connectors to the stock wiring (which might be a bit short in the end) or just get yourself the according connectors with preassembled wires. Then connect the wires (preferrably by soldering and insulating them prooerly) and you don’t even have to deal with crimping (and won’t have to buy a crimping tool set which not only might be challenging to use for most ppl, but which probably also will never be used by most ppl as well).
The only reasons I personally chose to make myself an adapter-cable set were that I already had the crimping tool and that I figured it might be smart to keep the option to switch back to the stock setup, just in case I have to test sth in the future for documenting it for the infosites.
But besides that, I don’t really see a reason to keep those proprietary connectors - once you made the mod and run a native Klipper, you won’t go back to the stock setup with KobraOS anyway (imho)…
I was more just thinking for the people who find this process daunting. A wiring harness you can just buy and hook up is the difference between will and won’t.
True, and as I said, it’s a nice idea. The harness would have to be made to suit a specific mobo then tho, and I already had users who reached out and asked certain questions because they wanted to use a different mobo then the one I used and wrote the instructions/tips for - so for those the harness most likely wouldn’t work.
Or did I get you wrong?
The way I understand the “wiring harness” is that you think about making a whole adapter-cable set and having that manufactured from a company to then sell it - right? So that it’s like a pretty much plug&play solution for the K2 Pro/Plus/Max and mobo XYZ?
I also don’t know how it would be with sth like being suable as the designer/manufacturer/seller if sth goes wrong then, like let’s say sth catches fire and the house burns down.
Someone recently mailed me and asked if I could make him an adapter-cable set - I declined. Based on my experiences in other OpenSource projects, even when the cable itself is fine, ppl can still mess it up when connecting sth wrong - and then it’s usally not them but always you who caused the problem. Same like with the printers and clearly user-caused problems and they still blame the manufacturer… That’s sth I really don’t wanna deal with anymore…
But that’s just me and my thoughts - so if you decide to come up with sth that makes it even easier for ppl to convert, let me know and I’ll be happy to mention it at the infosites!
Just to show what I mean with the possibility of someone still connecting it wrong etc - true story:
I had a K2 Neo user reaching out, because he came across my infosite, had several issues and gave it a try if I might be able to help him.
He dealt with AC’s support, they sent him several spare parts - new printhead, new mobo, new motors etc. Like really a lot of parts…
Still his weird problems like a malfunctioning extruder and several errors popping up persisted.
At one point I asked him to please take a picture of his whole printer and a closeup pic of the assembled/connected printhead. Turned out he somehow managed to plug in that coded IDC connector of the main ribbon cable of the head in the wrong way, he had turn it 180° and make that ‘nose’ fit in that notch (that’s what I mean with ‘coded’ connector). As soon as he did, everything worked just fine.
You can’t think of all the possible mistakes ppl can actually do, even tho it’s actually kind impossible to plug in a coded connector thw wrong way - at least I personally still scratch my head about how he actually did it when I think of it.
And with an adapter-cable set you wanna sell, where e.g. many XH connectors are the same size, it’s actually more easy to mess sth up - even if you label everything properly.
That’s why I personally wouldn’t want to deal with that kind of stuff, because someone will mess it up, even if it’s designed and documented as bulletproof as you can come up with…
I hear you, all good points. I don’t even know why I’m thinking about it, I have too many projects already. I think my main driver was just to make it easier to free people from the garbage anycubic ecosystem.
AC is clearly trying to copy Bambu and doing extremely poorly at it.
As someone who is ‘wasting’ an insane amount of time to create infosites about the printers and trying to help ppl out w/o getting anything out of it, I really appreciate it that you thought about how it could be even easier for ppl to convert to a native Klipper system
Oh yeah, that’s right - and the new K3 Combo is their next approach to get even closer to Bambu I think.
Iirc the K3 combo will be 599 in the end and the A1+AMS will be 549 - so AC better did a really good job, or they’ll really lose even more customers than they probably already did with the KobraOS models.
Unfortunately AC prefers to send out freebies to YouTubers for unboxing videos and reviews instead of sending me one for setting up an infosite about it to help ppl out, so I guess that’s it with infosites about AC printers from me then
