Trendy 3D printer management boards, firmware, and software program are superb. With most, you are able to do nearly all the pieces from a smartphone or pc over your native community — the times of strolling forwards and backwards with an SD card are lengthy gone. However there are nonetheless some capabilities you most likely need to have the ability to entry from the printer itself, which isn’t at all times straightforward with printers that lack bodily controls. To streamline such exercise, Tiny Boat Productions designed this nifty DIY macropad.
This can be a bodily management interface designed to sit down close to the 3D-printer’s controller (often a single-board pc like a Raspberry Pi nowadays) and provides the person fast entry to a handful of particular capabilities. For example, it may well have a button to pause the present print job, one other button to lift the nozzle barely, and one other button to load filament.
These are simply examples and it may well actually set off any motion, as a result of Tiny Boat Productions designed the macropad to work with Klipper. If you happen to aren’t already acquainted, Klipper is firmware and software program that has fully taken over the 3D printing trade. That’s as a result of it is rather subtle and highly effective. A part of that energy comes from its means to run customized macro scripts. For instance, I had a Klipper macro that may change the colour of my enclosure lighting to match the printer’s present standing. With this undertaking, Tiny Boat Productions is supplying you with a method to tie your macros to bodily buttons.
The important thing part of this macropad is a DFRobot Beetle RP2040 improvement board. The opposite elements embrace illuminated push buttons (DFRobot fashions with useful connectors) and a strip of SK6812 individually addressable RGB LEDs. These elements match into an enclosure that’s, after all, 3D-printable.
All the things else is code and Klipper has some useful utilities for functions precisely like this. It has the power to generate a firmware file for the event board’s Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, which can let it converse straight with the Klipper software program through USB. From there, you’ll be able to comply with the directions given by Tiny Boat Productions to arrange a customized configuration file for Klipper. In that, you’ll outline the button pins and LED pin, then specify their performance. On this case, that performance is triggering a macro in response to a button press. It’s also possible to do different neat stuff, like make the LED strip react to the printer’s standing.