I wanted to take a minute and share the Klipper controller board that I’ve been working on over the past few weeks.
It works very well and I’m running them on three (old) printers and they’ve been problem free. Two are using serial connections and the other is using USB.
The target for the board is the new Klipper user and is designed to have a Raspberry/Orange Pi zero 2W attached to it with power and serial communications connected using pogo pins.
To further make it easier for new users, it’s designed without any jumper blocks - having the TMC2209s built in eliminates most of them but the TMC2209 “Diag” pins are wired directly to the MCU.
In the design, I did a bit of experimenting with alternative peripheral interfaces as well as putting on multiple LEDs so the user can see what’s happening on the board and test the different functions.
Unfortunately, it is decidedly non-trivial to set up a serial interface for Klipper and it is host device specific. Once I had Klipper working, I had problems getting Katapult working with flashtool.py (thanx to @arksine for helping me figure out what I was doing wrong) which required a different procedure for setting up the serial port. The complexity of the serial interface set up procedure and the fact that it is different for every different device has lead me to the conclusion that this is not the way to go.
I’ve put the schematics and specifications on GitHub:
Comments are welcome and appreciated.