Category: Mainsail

If you own a 3D printer that runs on Klipper firmware, you might have spent a lot of time tweaking your printer.cfg file to get the best performance and quality. But what if something goes wrong and you lose your configuration? Or what if you want to try a different setting but don’t want to lose your previous one? That’s why it’s important to make backups of your Klipper printer configurations.

A backup is a copy of your printer.cfg file that you can save on your computer or a cloud service. You can use a backup to restore your configuration in case of an error, or to switch between different configurations for different purposes. For example, you might have a backup for printing with PLA and another one for printing with PETG. Or you might have a backup for printing fast and another one for printing slow.

Making backups of your Klipper printer configurations is easy and can save you a lot of trouble in the future. Here are the steps to do it:

  1. Connect to your Raspberry Pi via SSH or use the web interface of OctoPrint or Mainsail.
  2. Navigate to the folder where your printer.cfg file is located. Usually, it is in /home/pi/klipper_config.
  3. Copy the printer.cfg file and rename it with a descriptive name. For example, printer_pla.cfg or printer_fast.cfg.
  4. Repeat step 3 for each configuration you want to backup.
  5. Transfer the backup files to your computer or a cloud service using SCP, FTP, or any other method you prefer.

Now you have backups of your Klipper printer configurations that you can use anytime. To restore a backup, just copy the backup file to the folder where your printer.cfg file is located and rename it to printer.cfg. Then restart Klipper and enjoy your printing!

If you do much with a 3d printer, at some point you will need to head out of the house but still want to monitor your printer’s progress. There are a few ways to do it. I’ll tell you how I have my printer set up for this.

A few years ago I tried Octoprint on a Raspberry Pi, which was configured and connected to my printer with an attached camera. I used Octoprint to manage my printer and all of my gcode. It did a fine job, to be honest, and I don’t really have any complaints except that Octoprint feels “heavy” and sluggish.

At some point I found out about Klipper. I set it up one day to give it a try and I’ve stayed with Klipper ever since. It provides all of the tools that I need to monitor my printer and to manage my printer. It also provides me with an upgraded firmware that seems to give me better print results.

I’ve only been able to get Klipper to work on my home network, so I wasn’t really able to monitor my printer if I had to run to the grocery store for a minute. I found a telegram plugin that allows me to communicate with the printer from my cell phone, even if I’m not home. 

Ringing. Ghosting. Wavy walls. They all are the same thing and they all come from vibrations in your printer. A loose belt on a printer can cause a significant degradation of your prints. When I see that I have wavy walls, I start by checking to make sure that my belts are tight and that my rollers function smoothly and that they are tight too. From there, I cycle the motors back and forth, one axis at a time. Make sure that the look smooth. The human eye is not great at approximating large distances, but fantastic at noticing small changes, such as a roller that has a slight bump in it at a certain point in the axis.

Once I am convinced that my printer is mechanically as good as I’m able to make it, I pull out my software tricks. I enable resonance tuning in Klipper and run the resonance tuning test part. I typically get different values for the x and y axis, as they tend to resonate at different frequencies. This does a pretty good job of removing any remaining vibrations out of the system.

For those using Klipper, they just released a pretty major change in the way that they store files. When I updated to the latest version all of my config files disappeared. As I looked into it, there seemed to be a lot of other people experiencing the same issue. It turns out that my files did not disappear at all. They were still there, they just had the incorrect file permissions. Here is how I was able to fix it after some Googling.

First, ssh into your pi and take a look in ~/printer_data/configand ~/klipper_config.

If your files are in one of those places, then you should be fine. If neither of those folders has your config files, then that is a separate issue entirely and you should reinstall moonraker and klipper. If you were able to see the config files in your ssh session, but not from your web access, then run the following commands in ssh.

cd ~/moonraker
git pull
./scripts/data-path-fix.sh

This tip is so specific that I’m surprised that it has come up as frequently as it has. For context, many people use Klipper on a Raspberry Pi to manage their 3d printer. There are two main interfaces for Klipper, Mainsail and Fluidd. This tip is for those who are set up with Mainsail.

When moving your 3d printer to a new wifi network, there are two things that I do. With the Raspberry Pi powered off, remove the SD card and put it into your laptop or desktop computer. Ensure that you don’t use Notepad or Wordpad to edit the file, as they tend to bring in characters that mess up files. Use something like Notepad++ instead. In the root directory of the SD card you will find a file called mainsailos-wpa-supplicant.txt. Open that file in your text editor and change your network information. Most common nowadays is WPA/WPA2.

The other optional step that I do is to log into the router and set up my Raspberry Pi as a static ip address instead of letting DNS manage it. Each router is different, so I won’t go into detail on how to do that here. Most routers have something like “Advanced networking.”