I literally got CanBoot working on an Octopus V1.1 with the SB2040 (Voron) and Octopus V1.1 with EBB/42 (Custom CoreXY) last night/this morning. It’s not a horrendous experience, but it is horrendously poorly documented with the various pieces of documentation in conflict internally and with one another as well as not using the most efficient methods for carrying out the various tasks (and requiring you to download and use applications which are the author’s favourites, but not well suited for the task at hand).
The best instructions I found are here:
Now, the menuconfig settings are the same between the Monster and the Octopus, the big difference between the two are:
- The Octopus does not have the CAN and USB select/enable jumpers
- When doing a `make configmenu’ for the Octopus, make sure you select an STM32F466 and the 12MHz clock (which should be the processor on the Octopus board that you have - I have three, all bought at different times, from different sources and they all have the F466 processor)
- The Octopus does have a boot jumper that needs to be installed as well as removing the USB power jumper (as is discussed on page 7 of How to Use CAN Toolhead Boards Connected Directly to Octopus.pdf and shown here:
Any time the Octopus needs to be programmed using DFU the “Boot0 Install Jumper” has to be in place and the Octopus’s reset button pressed before the DFU operation can take place. It’s a good idea to do the lsusb command to make sure the STMicroelectronics STM Device in DFU mode comes up (it should go away after you remove the jumper and reset the Octopus).
Now, I had quite a bit of trouble using an SD Card that was created using the Raspberry Pi imager for “Mainsail OS”. I should point out that I saved the previous SD Card and used a new one for this operation - I previously used a USB to Can (UtoC Can Hat) board, so I had some idea of what to look for in terms of getting CAN working.
When I created a new OS image for the SD Card to be loaded into the Raspberry Pi, selecting the “Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit)” - the first option for the Raspberry Pi Imager and then installed Klipper, Moonraker and Mainsail using KIAUH, according to the instructions in the page give above, things started working from here. I don’t know if it was because using the “Mainsail OS” image from the Raspberry Pi Imager had some kind of problem or I was getting better at things, but I was able to move through the instructions (restarting them for the nth time) much better than I could before.
In the document listed above, when you get to: klipper_canbus/monster8v2.md at main · maz0r/klipper_canbus · GitHub, I have no idea what “Unfortunatley in my own testing I could not get these alternate pins to connect to my EBB36v1.1 board (YMMV)” means. I would say, however, make sure you understand how you’re going to make up your CAN/Power cabling and have a high degree of confidence that it is wired correctly.
That’s it. I’m not sure of a couple of things:
- Why does the Octopus have to be programmed with a “CanBoot” firmware image, followed by a klipper image that sets up the USB as a pass through for the CAN bus? Does the “CanBoot” step load in something that isn’t overwritten by the klipper image write?
- What is the “CanBoot Deployer” that comes up when doing a menuconfig for the Octopus? The Arksine documentation is vague on it and not really clear on why somebody would use it, especially since I seem to be able to use CanBoot to update the firmware without it.
Along with “How to Use CAN Toolhead Boards Connected Directly to Octopus” I used the following resources:
Good luck - if I get some free time I’ll try to write up my own instructions, especially if I get some answres to the questions above.