Apologies in advance if this has been asked and answered. I perused the documentation section here, as well as google and Youtube. My request is a instructional on creating a multiple 3D printer control hub from my touchscreen (All in one) PC, using Klipper. All the info I have found shows how to set up Linux, Klipper, Mainsail and so on. But at some point they all instruct you to use another device to ssh into the linux machine running klipper. My goal is to control multiple 3d printers(2 for now) from the very same PC running linux directly, epescially with it being a touch screen. Ideally I would fire it up, launch what ever needed GUI interface select which 3d printer i want to control and off I go.
I thank you all in advance for any help or suggestions and your patience.
You usually only need to SSH into it to change something behind the scenes which is rarely.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your question or what you’re trying to do, but once you’ve setup Klipper and Mainsail all you need to do is navigate to the Mainsail page per device. Which is usually just the IP address of that Pi (or whatever board).
You can control multiple printers just by opening up another tab in your browser.
First off thank you for responding. What I’m hoping to do is use my PC as if it was a BTT pad. So once I have installed Klipper on PC 1, I would then be able to control the 3D printers from that same PC, versus having to use a 2nd PC to log into the first that has linux and klipper…etc. Hopefully that made more sense.
The pads themselves are basically BTT’s version of a Raspberry Pi with a screen attached. You don’t typically run Klipper from a PC, you run it from a Raspberry Pi or equivalent and then use a PC (or Phone, Tablet whatever) to connect to the Web interface.
I mean, you COULD use a PC but that’s extreme overkill.
If you’re just looking to have a screen hooked up there are external screens touch screens that connect to the Raspberry Pi via HDMI and powered by USB.
Or, Like I said above, you can setup multiple printers with their own Pi and then use the web interface (Mainsail/Fluidd) and controller multiple printers with one PC by just opening different tabs.
If you want the exact same setup as a BTT Pad but controlling multiple printers, There might be a way to do it but I’m unsure on that one.
It’s not “overkill” as many people have an old Windows laptop lying around and wonder why they can’t load something like Linux Mint on them and have a nice host with a relatively great screen (compared to something like on the BTT Pad).
The reason why it is very not recommended to use a PC is because of the complexity of the OS and driver software needed to keep everything alive in the PC. The various processes often holding up the Klipper host process for some other higher priority task and that ends up causing the dreaded “Timer Too Close” error which is extremely difficult to debug with a Raspberry Pi 4B and becomes close to impossible to resolve in a PC.
If you look through the archives here, you’ll find many people who have tried running the Klipper host applications on a Linux PC and gave up after months of bashing their heads against a wall. To be fair, a few people have succeeded but that is the result of a lot of hard work and deep understanding of how Linux and Klipper works along with the ability to modify the code base.
One final point, don’t even think about running Klipper in a VM - I don’t think anybody has succeeded at this. The limited and intermittent CPU cycles provided to the VM makes successfully running Klipper impossible.
This might be technically possible, but it would not be simple. You would need to connect all your printers to your computer via USB or serial, and you would need to run multiple (probably containerized) instances of Klipper and Moonraker (and possibly also your frontend of choice), one for each printer. You’d need to make sure the computer can handle that processing overhead, because if the system runs low on resources, it could end up ruining every active print instead of just one. I would expect some custom code changes likely would be required here and there, as frontends (and slicer upload processes) typically look for a Klipper/Moonraker backend by IP address, which in this scenario wouldn’t be enough information to differentiate one backend instance from another.
The much, much simpler approach is to dedicate one SBC to each printer, set them up in the traditional manner, and then use your computer to access them in the manner you’re aiming for.
Yes I didn’t anticipate or expected it to be that troublesome in comparison to the traditional method.processing iThere are much simpler Solutions already in existence as she stated with the traditional manner. You hit the nail on the head. I’ll stick with traditional means or simply purchase a BTT pad. Thank you for the assist in your Insight greatly appreciated.
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