Sonic Pad - Mainline Klipper

General Discussion
21

Corporations deliberately don’t budget for providing support for open source software options to their products - it’s seen as giving away their intellectual property (IP). In the one case where I was aware of a company designing products and shipping them with the full product source as open source software (and using it to hire developers), “Squeezebox”, they were bought up by Logitech that shut down that operation almost immediately.

That doesn’t mean that corporations don’t take advantage of open source software; in what @jpe230 is describing in terms of forked software, I can basically guarantee you that Creality has not published their changes as required by the Creative Commons licenses in the software used in the Sonic Pad. To make matters worse, I can also basically guarantee you that Creality has hired developers that “know” Linux and are creating code that is basically a dead end and cannot be properly supported.

I’ve had discussions regarding the Sonic Pad with the owners of 3D Printing Canada, suggesting that they stop selling the product because it’s a piece of shit and probably will never work with even Creality printers 30% to 40% of the time. They said that they were in a bind with it as the margins on the product are better than other Creality products and the demand is there as Creality has done a good job paying for favourable reviews - if they don’t sell them, somebody else will and that means they’re potentially losing customers.

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So Creality has put together a product that kind of works, has decent (better than their printers) margins for both them as well as their distributors and anybody interested in finding out more will find many favourable reviews on line basically saying that it will make 3D printer user’s lives easier.

BTT is probably a more honest company in this but I have to think that they looked at what Creality was doing and decided to come up with the PAD7 because they had the resources (and many of the parts) already in house so the effort in putting together a product that’s twice as good as Creality’s (with the same margins) wasn’t a significant investment for them. That doesn’t mean I agree that they should have gone with forked and downlevel Klipper and other components just that I can see why they did it. Hopefully, they’ll merge back to Klipper’s main branch.

22

I’m just a little engineer and no marketing guy. I don’t agree with you.

Regarding your first paragraph, I don’t know “Squeezebox” and didn’t google for it. I have the feeling that changed long ago.

Regarding your second paragraph, what was jpe230 describing regarding forked software? Could you please attach the link to that statement?

Regarding your third paragraph :rofl:

Regarding your paragraph after the picture

I’m not sure.

MKS published their TMC2240 documents. BTT didn’t.

My point is, Sonic Pad and Bigtreetech Pad 7 are good products. No way to protect IP (both are Chinese) in that sector, you want to make quick money. Both of them address the open 3D community. I would have been expecting a forum for “Marlin” and another one for “Klipper” opened by the manufacturers. And of course access to all sources. Best support will win.

23

From the OP:

Some background:
The Sonic Pad runs Tina Linux, a forked version from Allwinner of OpenWRT, with old versions of Klipper, Moonraker, Mainsail and Fluidd.

I can’t comment on the PAD7 as I haven’t worked with it. I do have more experience with the Sonic Pad than I would like and in no way would I consider it a “good product”.

My positive comments about the PAD7 are based on being able to review the PAD7’s schematics:

and that the product runs the current version of Klipper (and associated packages).

Whereas the Sonic Pad does not provide their schematics (and, as I and others have indicated here and elsewhere, there seems to be an issue with at least some of its USB ports) and the source is forked and downlevel.

24

Dear Jose @jpe230,

thank you for your latest update on Github! Glad to see that you´re still working on it :heart_eyes:

In the installation steps, you mentioned that we need to configurate the WiFi in KlipperScreen and get the IP of the pad. But in the known bugs you also advice, that the current IP doesn´t show in KlipperScreen. So how can this work?

My personal workaround would be, that I fix in advance the IP for the MAC address of the Pad in my router, but I like to be sure before I brick my device :grimacing:

Thanks a lot!

25

Thanks for all you hard working on this @jpe230 .

Regarding the FS being mount as RW, any way around that ?
Also what GUI is on the original Sonic pad ? seems different to Klipperscreen.

26

Thanks, perfect.
I will try to connect adxl345 but it doesn’t work [mcu rpi] I have no idea how to connect it, the rest works.

[mcu rpi]
serial: /tmp/klipper_host_mcu
###<<<--- END --->>>


[adxl345]
cs_pin: rpi: None
spi_bus: spidev2.0 #spi_bus: spidev1.1
spi_speed: 2000000 #spi_speed: 2000000
axes_map: x,y,z 
# ###<<<--- END --->>>



[resonance_tester]
accel_chip: adxl345
accel_per_hz: 70
probe_points:
          180,180,20
min_freq: 5
max_freq: 133.33
hz_per_sec: 1
# ###<<<--- END --->>>
1 Like
27

Usually a reboot makes the IP appear, it seems that there it a bug with klipperscreen or NetworkManager, I haven’t looked heavily into it.

Personally I use my router to get the ip, if you are feeling adventurous you can install avahi…

28

The kernel supports an overlayfs so it can be possible to use a different partition to mount only as r/w certain parts of the rootfs (just like the stock os) but I haven’t tested this theory and it is way out of my knowledge

It is an in-house ui, as mentioned previously, it is based on fluidd and creality heavily modified it to be used as a replacement of klipperscreen.

29

I would have to disagree with your entire break down of sineos original comments…

I personally have gone down the road of the sonic pad, problem after problem( check out forums around i am not in the slightest a rare case) question after question. let me tell you these problems are random and entirely sporadic within 5 mins of finishing a print i could try to load same print and have 6 different problems arise. Anyways regardless i am now awaiting new parts from creality again for the sonic pad i have replacement pretty much the whole unit at this point, but instead of waiting i went out and purchased a manta m4p withh cb1 and a hdmi7 screen, i will tell you its a night and day difference. I am in canada and the prices vary from 225 to 250 with 250 being the norm for the sonic pad, now the packadge i bought came in at about 30 ish dollars canadian cheaper then the sonic pad and thats a whole new board and screen.

So yes the sonic pad is a huge peice of CRAP! a 200 dollar paper really.

The sonic pad is crealitys attempt at regaining what they have lost in the market with players like bigtree(biqu), sovol etc making such big gains… unfortunately i dont think their life support lines have the quality to bring them back to what they had been.

1 Like
30

Have you got it working yet i haven’t figured it out?

31

@jpe230 I’m hoping you see this as you have not been on here in a while. I’m having a strange issue and I want to see if my conclusion’s correct.

I installed your Debian image, and an abnormal amount of space is being eaten up on my pad. I checked it up to a full distro on the pad require space. But then I tried to assign it the previous IP address that I had when it was on the Sonic pad software and it won’t load. When I say it doesn’t load I get Moonraker but I don’t get the Moonraker instance of the Debian I get the Moonraker instance of the old Sonic pad software and it will not work.

So my question is, does the previous image remain intact somewhere on here that would cause this issue? As soon as I changed the IP address to dynamic or moved it to a different static IP one above the previous, everything works like a charm but I’m looking at my usage is around 65% when before it seemed like I was closer to 35%, so it seems as though the previous image is still intact.

Thoughts?

32

Greetings,

The space used, as you mentioned, is higher in comparison to the stock OS, sadly there isn’t much to do, except from removing unused packaged :stuck_out_tongue:

Responding to your question, the EMMC gets totally rewritten when you flash the firmware, the partition structure, as well as the size of the partition, are totally different vs the stock image, so the possibility of booting to the stock OS is not plausible.

Cheers

33

@jpe230 thank you for getting back to me. So I have an odd issue then. When I set the IP to the previous instance, fluidd starts to load and I see my old printers name and then it reverts to it cannot connect. When I change up, everything works as should. I have tested this on 3 devices, 1 of which never connected to the printer before. Any thoughts as to why this would be happening?

34

Something messed up in your network:

  • Manually defined IPs, resulting in an IP collision → Use DHCP
  • Something badly cached on your Pad → Flush DHCP and DNS caches and reboot, e.g.
    # Run as sudo and make sure to adapt the ntwork interface (eth0)
dhclient -r -v eth0 && rm /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.* ; dhclient -v eth0
  • Something badly cached on your client OS → Flush DHCP and DNS caches and reboot, e.g. ipconfig /release followed by ipconfig /renew followed by ipconfig /flushdns on Windows
  • Something badly cached in your router → Restart router
1 Like
35

@Sineos I will try this today. Thank you.

@jpe230 there’s an issue opened on Your GitHub about the nebula camera not working. Any possible way you could look into this? It works on and it works on other clipper installations so not sure why it wouldn’t be on Debian.

36

I bought a Sonic Pad when starting with 3d printing hoping for an easy Klipper solution. I was wrong, and eventually found @jpe230 Debian implementation. The pad has worked as required since then, however I recently modded the connected printer and installed 2 EBB42 to eliminate most of the cabling. Unfortunately, the kernel image used doesn’t appear to support CANbus and repackaging a kernel image that does is above my knowledge. I had to resort two running 2 instance on my RPi, which allowed me to set up the two printers, but only be able to use one at a time, since Klipper doesn’t seem to support 2 CAN networks (posted the problem in GD). It would be great to be able to use the SP with CAN.

37

I dont know shit about Klipper… But everybody happy with it…
So i got Sonic Pad as Plug&Play kinda option for Ender 3 Pro and Kobra Max… to find out oh … It support my printer… well… it support printer with different MCU… Or support MCU on different printer…
And even if your model supported you will have some kinda shit going on… So im at the point … May be get another board… or get another printer… Then Sonic Pad is worthless for me…
For example BTT Pad 7… doesn’t say its Plug&Play thing…
8)