Klipper has to be usb or serial line attached to the controller, so usually the tablet loads the web user interface to control the thing over the network connection to the raspberry pi that is attached to the printer. I used KIAUH to install klipper, moonraker, mainsail, crowsnest, and klipperscreen on the raspberry pi, though you could use a PC rather than a pi for this. If you can root a fire tablet, perhaps you could USB to the controller. That would be a trick… mainsail takes the place of octoprint, but that is just the user front end. I don’t know that you can run mainsail and klipper on networked machines separately or if you’d want to. I haven’t had time to watch the video yet, so forgive if I misunderstand.
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I know it’s possible to have “free range” Klipper and Klipperscreen on this, as people who know what they are doing have done it, and reported back. But they did not seem to share tutorials, and I have no idea how they did it, or what to do on my end. Right now I’ll have to just wait and see what’s going on.
Since there is nothing like a Pi inside this printer’s backend (ie. as stock from the manufacturer), then I’m assuming if they are doing Klipper style “offloading” of computation away from the main board, perhaps the LCD’s processor is taking the place of a Pi in this particular setup. The LCD has two USB ports. One on the side normally used for thumbdrives for GCode, and one on the back normally used for attaching a camera. I shared (above) a link to video of someone having somehow installed Killperscreen onto this LCD.
Also, the mainboard seems to have only an Ethernet port, and a port to connect to the LCD. It has no USB ports on it, although it seems to have screen printed markings for a couple of USB ports that have empty holes where nothing was soldered on. It gets firmware updates from the LCD. There is one set of pins on the main board labelled “debugging.”
Thanks to Chris Nolan, @Chazicon, who sent me a message with a link to more info about Klipper on Flashforge AD5M:
After reading some of the related discussion there, it confirms my suspicion that the AD5M’s main board already has stock Klipper on it!
Quoting from Mainsail and Moonraker for Flashforge AD5M · Issue #6 · g992/flashforge-ad5m-5mpro-research · GitHub
It looks like the printer comes with a more or less stock Klipper 0.11, see GitHub - FlashforgeOfficial/AD5M_Series_Klipper
so you can use the kindle as a screen to control it via the webpage? Very cool.
I have some Amazon Fire Tablets I got cheap one year at Black Friday time. Some I gave away as gifts, some I kept. The ones I kept, I did the “jailbreak” thing immediately. I also then loaded Octoprint onto all of them. They can be used with printers that have normal USB on a main board that runs normal Marlin. The issue with this AD5M is it does not have a USB on the main board, but rather Ethernet. The main board does run a more or less stock install of Klipper. I just don’t know enough to get around the non-Klipper GUI on the LCD.
Can you get the IP address of the printer and use that to get to it from the FT? I don’t use octoprint with klipper so I’m not much help but I know for mainsail all I need is the IP address and I’m in
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I have 3 kindles. do you have a procedure you used for this jailbreak thing you could share?
If you can believe it… The children of mine who got them from me as gifts, who did not jailbreak them immediately… I tried later and the software I used to do mine, no longer worked.
I don’t know that it’s necessary to jailbreak it to install Octoprint.
Re.
I am not sure if there is any important difference between Fire Tablet and “Kindle.”
Destined to be klipper screens… the 8" pi touch is fabulous on the big printer I have and with the migration of the mpcnc to klippercnc with the new part upgrade that is in process currently, these kindles could work nicely. Just a few more printed base parts and cable chains then start the reconfig. I hope this tougher rebuild lasts more than one summer cut season.
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“well it’s less than the cost of your Dyson Vacuum cleaner” has worked for me!
“one third the price of the coffee machine on your kitchen bench - when you could have had a Nespresso!”
“Ten week’s worth of petrol/gasoline”
“less than the cost of having your car serviced”
“You spent HOW MUCH on a television?”
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That’s the issue here I believe. Although it is running a stock Klipper build, it’s a locked down build currently, so no way to make any changes besides what you can change in the UI of the printer.
That’s no fun, but I believe they will figure it out soon, and release it all. Only thing I can’t figure out is… how with no usb on the board, how would it connect to a pi?
If its already running klipper then it has some variance of a pi on it already. So shouldnt need to connect another pi
But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? The PI takes calculation responsibility from the MCU. If it is just a 32bit cheap board running klipper, that’s why it’s locked down. It couldn’t handle adding anything else on top of it. So no mainsail, no crowsnest, no moonraker. If you want those, I’d imagine you would have to add in a pi.
There are main boards that have pico chips on them, that’s the Pi. Or it could have an actual pi like a manta does. I don’t have it in front of me to look at but I’ve never heard of klipper being installed on a standard 32bit board. Its always on some kind of pi variant. It doesn’t have to be a separate board to work. Now in saying all of that I could very well be completely wrong.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/17oagwu/flashforge_adventurer_5m_pro_motherboards/)
He mentions the hope to connect it to a pi, so I think that is that.
My current thinking is that the part of Klipper that goes onto a main board, as “firmware”, (as in klipper.bin or firmware.bin) is on this thing’s main board, and the part of Klipper that goes into a Pi, is on the LCD of this thing. I could be wrong, but that’s my thought right now.
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Pico and full Pi are different classes of compute capability. Pico is a beefy microcontroller, but still a uC.
Klipper host isnt going to run on a pico.
An allwinner T113 is a dual Cortex-A7. There’s your compute platform. I don’t know if it kas a Klipper style host, but its likely this is the application processor.
post a picture of the display mainboard.
Edit: the T113 is targeted at embedded (automotive) applications, and has a long-lifecycle (10 year) support timeframe. It’s a bit short of RAM for a full up Klipper plus extras. Still plausible that there’s additional compute on the touchscreen. Or, this may have some other embedded printer firmware.
I’m curious to know more about the implementation.
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disclaimer: I’m new to this, but trying to understand and this is what makes sense to me, but it may not be entirely correct.
I think the issue here is that klipper is the controller firmware and moonraker is the raspberry pi sender. you can run klipper with an attached display running something like the moonraker sender like you run marlin from an lcd, but it doesn’t have the web services of mainsail/fluidd/octoprint to allow a remote machine to control it. Most of us refer to klipper as the combination of klipper firmware, moonraker and the gui (mainsail, fluidd, octoprint).
So while your printer might have klipper on the board to control the motors, it may not have the ability to run the gui, which is where the raspberry pi comes in. The pico would be another microcontroller running klipper firmware.
Agreed. Klipper host runs on Linux. No one (AFAIK) has done that on a microcontroller (and it would only be for the name, the functionality would be lost).
How does the screen talk to klipper? On a pi, the klipper host interacts with octoprint via a linux socket. Maybe that is pulled out onto a uart on this board.
Does this have wifi? Can you ssh into it? Something must be possible here. We shouldn’t have to reverse engineer it.