General re lack of pi's

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Printer Model:
MCU / Printerboard:
klippy.log

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Describe your issue:

Raspberry Pi’s are now made of pure unobtainium.

Can the latest bannana pi BPI-M5 run this?, I have 4 of them coming.

I have 2 bigger printers, an ender5plus and a tronxy-400 pro and neither can be made to work with newer hot ends and direct drives with the stock controller and marlin. I cannot set a
g1f500z.2 and get .2mm on either.

So I also have some of BTT’s latest high voltage (60 volt motor) 8 axis boards, displays and 5160 drivers coming.

And some SSR’s to control bed warming power from a 5kw 2/1 transformer giving 63 volts
to heat beds as they are both very slow heating on 24 volts. The tronxy is about 12 minutes from room to 80C. And I eventually want to hook up the accelerometer on both printers.

Please advise of any gotcha’s the above will generate. ;o)>

Take care & stay well folks.

Cheers, gene1934

I forgot to add that I am a CET and can probably contribute to the electronics knowledge here, once I get these printers running…

Cheers, gene1934

Where are you looking for rPis?

I’m seeing more places where they are in stock (especially rPi 4s) - prices are quite high, but they are available. To be fair, the stock of rPi Zeros seem to have been seriously depleted in the past few months and their prices are skyrocketing.

One trick to getting a rPi 4 is to look at a vendor’s supply of “kits” (which includes a case, power supply, etc.) - you may not need that, but the price over a rPi by itself isn’t that much. Remember to look for the kit with the smallest SD card as I find they will really soak you on SD cards. You’re much better off getting them somewhere like Staples or Best Buy.

There are many vendors on Amazon and AliExpress that have rPi boards. Personally I lean toward AliExpress as they have a tighter rein on their vendors and I haven’t had the same problems with “mistakes” as with Amazon vendors.

Good luck!

Basically every halfway modern SBC will work unless it is very exotic. I’m running Klipper on a RPi 3b and on an OrangePi 3 LTS.

Issues you might be experiencing is not from the SBC but from the Linux distribution running on it. Unlike Raspberry, all of them have only a small community and often the distributions provided by the manufacturers are crap. E.g. on my OPi the WiFi sooner or later crashes forcing a reboot. Luckily I can run it via ethernet, which is stable.

What kind of topics to be expected is hard to tell but most likely:

  • Stability
  • GPIO support
  • I2C support
  • SPI support

The last 3 items can easily be worked around by using a Raspberry Pi Pico, which is rock solidly supported by Klipper.

In doubt, I would at least choose an alternative that has an active maintainer in the armbian community.

2 Likes

Unforch, that doesn’t answer my question. which was, will it run on a
banana pi BPI-M5 with 4gigs of dram, probably
running armbian’s version of debian sid. I have 2 rock64’s running
octoprint on that distro now, but they were new in
2016, and their video suffers horrible trash in the video from net or
usb traffic. rpi3b’s &4b’s don’t. And the bpi’s out usb
the rpi4b as all usb ports are usb3. I have half a terabyte of drives
plugged into that pi, and its a full blown developer
station for linuxcnc, Complete with a realtime kernel I built on it.

rpi4b 4G and 8G kits start here right at $300 USD, a far cry from the
$70 I paid for that rpi4b w/2G’s 4 years ago
that has been running my 11x54 Sheldon lathe, one of 4 CNC machines I’ve
built, but the BPI’s are only $89 USD.
And I’ve already got the 5v 5a supplies to run them. And I’m probably
capable of fixing any reasons it might not run.

They won’t be here for another couple weeks, and I should probably round
up some heat sink kits & small SSD’s. I can print
boxes for them that can include fans once I get my prusa running again.
Its mosquito hot end is leaking.

Thank you, take care & stay well Myke Predko

Cheers, Gene Heskett.

1 Like

Basically every halfway modern SBC will work unless it is very exotic. I’m running Klipper on a RPi 3b and on an OrangePi 3 LTS.

Issues you might be experiencing is not from the SBC but from the Linux distribution running on it. Unlike Raspberry, all of them have only a small community and often the distributions provided by the manufacturers are crap. E.g. on my OPi the WiFi sooner or later crashes forcing a reboot. Luckily I can run it via ethernet, which is stable.

What kind of topics to be expected is hard to tell but most likely:

  • Stability
    Has been excellent with the rock64’s
  • GPIO support
    Is a question mark. On the rpi’s, a professor in Sweden wrote the SPI
    driver code that runs at
    41 out, 25 back in, both in megabaud on either pi. And it Just Works.
    Uses 3 pins of gpio. And a
    very short transmission line about 4 cm long.
  • I2C support
    you use that? I’ve only tangled with one i2c, and found that a cable 1
    foot longer than i2c specs did not work.
    I’m a retired broadcast engineer, and a CET, I understand VSWR, the i2c
    designers obviously do not.
  • SPI support

The last 3 items can easily be worked around by using a Raspberry Pi Pico, which is rock solidly supported by Klipper.

In doubt, I would at least choose an alternative that has an active maintainer in the armbian community.

Thanks Sineos, take care and stay well.

Cheers, Gene Heskett.