My cousin passed away a few months ago. His parents gave me his 3d printer. I am trying to figure out how to use this, but I am lost. My own printer is a heavily modded Tevo Tarantula with a Raspberry Pi on which I’ve installed Marlin and configured to run the way I want. HIS printer, however, is running Klipper. Having heard of Klipper is about the extent of my knowledge here. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
The printer itself looks like photos I see of the Anet A8, except that the control board appears to be branded BIGTREETECH. I guess he upgraded that? The display and buttons on the top are not connected to the controller, but it (the controller) is instead connected to a Raspberry Pi with a touch screen running Klipper.
For starters, I don’t know how to actually connect to this. I found a screen that sees my wifi router by name. I entered the password in the text field asking for the PSK password and when I refresh the network list, it shows the router along with text including “Channel 11” so I assume that that means that it is in fact connected to the router? Only, I do not see this listed as a connected device in my routers device list.
Also, this doesn’t seem to recognize files on a usb flash drive, so I can’t print anything from it, either. It appears to have files already stored on it, so I assume that I have to upload the files to klipper, but unless I can connect to it, I can’t print that way, either.
Can anyone help me figure out how to use this? If I were starting from scratch, I’m sure I could figure this out, but since I am walking into a previously functioning system blind… I’m lost!
I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back sooner, but I only just now got time to fool with this.
So, it appears that it WAS connecting to the WiFi, there just wasn’t any indication of such. I found that the ip address of the machine is 169.254.72.229… which is a LONG way from my own local network of 192.168.1.xxx so I can’t even begin to connect to that wirelessly. (can I?) Anyway, I did hook up a network cable to the pi and was able to ssh in, but the typical username/password combination of pi/raspberry isn’t working, so I’m guessing he changed it.
Since I can’t ssh in without a working password and I can’t connect wirelessly without changing the ip address to something more local and I can’t change the ip address without ssh’ing in… I seem to be caught in a circle. Short of rebuilding this from the firmware up… is there anything else I can try?
From everything I’ve read, klipper seems to be above my head… and I have no problem understanding marlin or octopi. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I’d appreciate anything you could tell me. Thanks.
As every printer firmware, there is a bit of a learning curve, but I would consider it less than Marlin. Actually, Klipper’s philosophy is different and this might seem intimidating for the Marlin user.
Would you happen to have any knowledge of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4? From what I can tell, instead of booting off of an sd card, this thing has had it’s emmc flashed. I’m looking now, but I can’t find anything on how to actually retrieve and/or modify that. I’m running Ubuntu as a main system if that helps.
It’s sad. Growing up, I taught my cousin everything I knew about computers. Apparently he kept up with technology and I did not…
On CM-IO-board, shorten the “J2” jumper at the “Fit jumper to disable eMMC boot” position
Connect the IO-board to the other Linux machine via its micro-USB-port and power on the CM
Start usbboot
Now you should have your eMMC connected like a regular USB thumb drive
Follow the tutorial on resetting the password
Side note: If you think this is too involved, then I have bad news for you. Since you already have a running Linux on the eMMC, you would have to follow this process even for installing a fresh Linux OS on the CM (or try booting from a USB thumb drive, which can be an even bigger pain in the back on the CM4s)
Side note2: There might be an easier way, but I’m not aware.
When I said I was running ubuntu, I meant on my laptop, not the pi. I have no CLUE what he was running on that. Sorry for the confusion.
I saw mention of usbboot on some other pages, but I thought that was just for flashing the emmc. I didn’t realize that I could use that to connect to it like a flash drive. NOW we may be getting somewhere! Thank you, once again.
