Other Single Board Computers (SBC) apart from Raspberry Pis

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Other Single Board Computers (SBC) apart from Raspberry Pis

General

  • Klipper will run on almost any recent SBC, or for this matter, any machine running Linux
  • Klipper’s hardware requirements are very low:
    • A Raspberry Pi (first generation - RPi0) is considered the lowest possible end (without webcam or OctoPrint)
    • From Raspberry Pi 3 and onward, no performance issues are to be expected, even with User Interfaces or webcams
  • Running a User Interface (especially OctoPrint) or a webcam might significantly increase RAM and CPU requirements
  • Klipper will in no way profit from high power CPUs or dozens of GB RAM
  • It is recommended to use the SBC dedicatedly for Klipper and not run any other services on it

Which one to choose

  • The biggest advantage of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem is its excellent Linux / Kernel support
  • Many alternative boards have an abysmal support in terms of Linux (outdated, buggy or both)
  • A SBC that has a solid support in the Armbian community is a good start
    • Consult the Armbian download page and search their forum before buying as there might be relevant limitations already known
  • GadgetVersus offers an excellent comparison of different CPU performances that are commonly used on such SBCs, e.g.

Potential Pitfalls

  • A pure Klipper should be able to run on any board with almost any distribution
  • Connecting additional hardware to the pin-headers then depends on how good the support of the Linux distribution is
  • Problems may especially arise around:
    • Stability
    • GPIO support
    • I2C support
    • SPI support
  • Klipper’s install scripts are heavily focused on Debian like distributions. Other distributions might need manual installation, which requires some Linux admin knowledge
  • Some distributions might require to add the user running Klipper to the dialout system group:
    • sudo usermod -a -G dialout <user_here>
  • Some distributions install services that might interfere with Klipper. Most noteworthy are
    • ModemManager
    • BRLTTY
    # List all brltty services (replace with "modemmanger" to check this)
sudo systemctl list-units | grep -i brltty
# For each item in the result list of the above command run
sudo systemctl mask brltty.path
sudo systemctl stop brltty.path
# "brltty.path" is only an example. Replace it with the first command's output
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