What is a firmware?

3D printers are computers, just like most other things these days. They have to have some sort of logic to tell them what to do. This is where firmware comes in. The most common firmwares these days are

• Marlin
• Klipper
• RepRap

Most of the factory produced printers will most likely come with Marlin firmware, which seems to be the industry standard. Marlin is great as a firmware in many ways. It's well supported by slicers, most printers use it out of the box, it probably is tuned specifically for your printer to make life better, the list goes on. So why is the title of this "Klipper and you" if Marlin is so great?

Klipper

Klipper is an up and coming firmware for 3D printers with features that were never possible before. Unlike most firmware, it splits the duty of processing everything. The controller that normally runs marlin gets turned into a stupid device that only takes very basic low level commands to drive stepper motors, and that's it. So where does the real work happen? On a Raspberry Pi. A raspberry pi is much faster than anything you could ever build a 3D printer with, including the most expensive driver boards. Some of the most notable features of Klipper that aren't found on Marlin are

Pressure advance

Pressure advance is an advanced way to calculate the assumed pressure in the nozzle, and react accordingly. This prevents the oh so common oozing out of the nozzle that affects things like stringing, and other imperfections in prints, even when printing slowly. Not everyone only prints slowly, so comes in the next feature.

You can read more about it here.

Input Shaping

It's no secret that things moving fast will vibrate, and resonate. That resonance shows up in your prints if moving fast enough. The usual fix is to stiffen up your printer, which is always a great first step, but eventually you just can't get it better without changing the design. In comes this feature. It uses the massive processing power of the raspberry pi to predict the resonance of the device after calibration, and cancel it out before it gets sent as instructions to the printer. This lets you reach much higher speeds without seeing the artifacts in your prints.

You can read more about it here.

The bad part

Klipper is not all sun and rainbows. Prusa stock firmware at least had some nice features. A simple step by step Z offset tuning, simple filament change setting, and the screen on the printer actually did something (not a Klipper problem, just not supported on the Prusa Mini on Klipper). I think that it may be a massive step up for many on printers like the Ender 3 to get much better prints, even at stock speeds, but there is a learning curve. It's not hard, but it is a project. The kind people in the Klipper discord are wonderful, and the docs are stunning, not to mention the amount of YouTube coverage the firmware has on high end printers such as the Voron series of printers. If you prefer Marlin, it's not like you can't go back, so I would say that Klipper is worth a shot if you have the time, or like to tinker.

Conclusion

While klipper may not have features that your stock Marlin does, it's open source, always getting better, has great community support, and has multiple front ends, and isn't limited to Octoprint. I'll be talking more about my fore into my experience with this firmware in a future article about flashing it to my Prusa Mini to give it a test drive, and why I did it. I'll leave some notes below for myself, and probably others that stumble onto this, and wonder how to do simple things that you may need to relearn coming from a nice UI like Marlin on the Prusa series of printers at least.

Notes

I'll come back and edit this as self reference, as well as possibly helping others that are as confused as I was.

Z offset calibration

• Home the printer
• PROBE_CALIBRATE
• Do the paper test
• ACCEPT

Why you absolutely want to try this.

Octoprint is a simple concept. It's a web server that gives you control of your printer. This could be useful if you don't have a screen, but it can do a lot more than just print a gcode file. I'll touch on a few features of octoprint that make it compelling to many users.

Send a print directly from a slicer

Many modern slicers such as PrusaSlicer, SuperSlicer, Slic3r, ect all have the ability to communicate directly with octoprint. This saves the hastle of moving a flash drive around, and trying to remember what settings were in the gcode if you may be using a different filament than you were before. No need to wonder any more. Just slice, and send it over!

Instructions for PrusaSlicer and SuperSlicer can be found here

Monitor your prints from anywhere

Octoprint allows you to see the gcode draw what the printer is doing, as well as add a webcam to let you monitor progress. Never wonder if your print is going ok when you are distracted and not watching it. Just check in once in a while remotely and get back to doing things! If it failed, you can even stop the print remotely.

Timelapses

Once you have a webcam to check in, you may as well make a timelapse, and Octoprint has that feature built right into it! It's great for watching how prints fail to help you tune, or just fun to see them getting played back at super speed.

Keep track of prints, both working, and failed.

We all like to print things, but we never really keep track of how much filament we go through, or how much it costs. There are plugins that can keep track of how much each print used, and how much it costs, so if you want to print another, you can get an idea of cost, or how much of your spool you'll need to print something, and all at a glance.

Kick off prints anywhere

Ever not been at your printer and knew the printer was ready to go, but didn't want to wait until you are back home to start a print? Thanks to the camera, you can check in, and even start a print, all on the go. There are even mobile apps for iOS, and android and those are just two examples.

Many many more plugins

These are not the only things that Octoprint can do. There are tons of user plugins that extend the functionality massively, or just change the way it looks. I don't have a ton of plugins going, but I'll list a few that I think others would enjoy.

• Bed Visualizer
• PrintTimeGenius
• The Spaghetti Detective

Afterthoughts

So far I'm having a lot of fun with my printer, and getting amazing results, and Octoprint makes it all the better. It's free, and can run on as little as a Rasperry Pi Zero, so there's little reason to not give it a shot. More things like this will be coming in the future.

How good can it be for $400?

Short answer: Amazing. Buy one right now, then come back to read what you just got for your money.

The longer answer is probably why you are here, so I guess I should stop stalling. I've played with other's printers on and off for years. I hear other people that have 3D printers complaining that it's basically just another project car. Something you sink money and time into, and it gives you nothing but problems, but you enjoy it for the hobby. This is exactly what I didn't get with the Prusa Mini.

So how many issues did I have?

First off, I decided that a kit was not for me on my first printer, so I got it assembled. Right out of the box, I opened the printer and put in a few screws, and plugged in a few wires. Because I had no clue what I was doing, it took about an hour or two, but it over all was pretty easy. Loaded up some Galaxy Black PLA that came with the printer that was packed in for testing, set the Z offset with on screen instructions, plugged in the included USB drive to the printer, found something that looked interesting, and hit print. With zero effort, and no mistakes, the first print came out looking stunning, and everything I've printed since then in the same Galaxy Black has come out looking just as good.

But I have to complain about something

PETG IS ABSOLUTELY A NIGHTMARE TO WORK WITH! I printed about half of my spool of Galaxy Black PLA, and loaded up some PETG, switched out the bed for the textured sheet as was instructed, switched out the spool, and set the Z height for the new bed. Off to the races right? No... Conveniently, Prusa has profiles for their filament in Prusa Slicer, so everything you could need to tune for the printer, or the filament is basically done for you. It's even labled on every spool, what the temp range for the nozzle and bed should be. Easy enough right? Print after print, PETG failed. Lifting from the bed, sometimes even on the first layer. I contacted support, who was absolutely fantastic, generating things for me to print to test, offering me advice on things that could be physically wrong, and more. They stayed on the chat with me for several hours before I gave up for the day, and went to sleep. I ultimately discovered that the edges of my bed were lower than expected due to a draft from the nearby window cooling the plate down faster than it could auto react. I bumped up the heatbed issues, and haven't had sticking issues since. I'll ramble more about materials later in a separate post though, but know that some materials are amazing, and some need a bit of work.

This sounds mostly bad so far. Why do I want this?

While I did complain a bit about PETG, that ended up mostly user error as most people don't keep a printer by the window in the pacific north west where the nights cool rapidly, so this won't be an issue. I could have also asked around, and learned that a simple and cheap pop up enclosure would have fixed many of my issues as well. For only $400 USD, I got a printer that will print Prusa PLA right out of the box, even in subpar temperature conditions to the point that I was convinced that it should all be that easy, because it required no thought. I could start printing a keyboard case, and leave for work after I saw one layer go down, I could trust that when I got home, I would have a keyboard case, and did.

Conclusion

These are just my initial thoughts on this printer, and I'll be doing more on 3D printing. I think I'll have a lot of topics to talk about that others will be interested in. This is a great printer out of the box, but there's a world more that can be done, and not even risk the near perfection that you get out of the box. For now, I'll just leave this as a teaser.

Zerotier Primer

To understand this, you'll first need to understand the very basics of how ipv4 networks work. I'll only gloss over things here, but you won't need to know a lot in order to actually use zerotier. It's mearly explaining what you should understand in order to know how to use it.

Subnets

Most devices these days are behind a firewall, and an ipv4 router. Ipv4 is comprised of addresses that are 4 octets (0 to 255), seperated by dots. It may look like 1.1.1.1 or 192.168.0.1. These addresses are broken into 2 groups. Private and public.

Private

• 10.0.0.0/8 IP addresses: 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255
• 172.16.0.0/12 IP addresses: 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255
• 192.168.0.0/16 IP addresses: 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255

These ranges are consider private, so you can assign these to devices behind a router and not conflict with anything else in the world.

Public

Anything outside of the range of these addresses is considered public. These could be things like DNS servers like 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 ect, or even websites that you browse every day. Normally you use DNS addresses, but it's all these numbers under the hood in the public range that you are actually using.

Why does this matter?

Your home network has access to it's private range of addresses that allow all of your devices to talk to each other. Want to copy files back and fourth, or SSH over from one box to the other? It's all good to go. When you aren't at home, these addresses aren't accessable to you however. This is where zerotier comes into play.

Zerotier as a service, gives you a virtual private address, and everything within your own network also has one. Unlike your regular network address, this can be used to talk to your devices anywhere, as long as they are on your zerotier network, just the same as if you were home. The possibilities are truly endless here.

Why not a VPN?

A VPN is similar in concept to zerotier. You join a network, and can talk to other devices. The main difference between zerotier and a VPN is that there is no "router". Lets say you have 3 devices.

• Laptop
• VPN server
• Desktop

Every time you talk from your laptop to your desktop, you will have to route through the VPN. This may not seemingly matter to you, but if the connection between either device, and the VPN is slow, or even the VPN itself is slow, the whole connection is slow. The connection visually would look something like this.

Laptop <-> VPN <-> Desktop

Zerotier on the other hand doesn't run a server. It's an ethereal network that connects devices directly in a P2P system, and no zerotier server sits in the middle. This gives you much faster connections, lower latency, and less connections to fail. Visualized, it would look like this

Laptop <-> Desktop

Security

There is an alternative to this that can be used, though it has it's drawbacks. It's port forwarding. This allows anyone with access to your public address to talk to that port. Lets say that you open port 22 on your home server to the world so you can access a shell remotely. This exposes it to anyone in the world that may want to try to get in. You'll have to harden your security to ensure that you aren't broken into, and still have to take the system load of constant attacks as bots will scan for, and try to break into any public address on the internet. Zerotier on the other hand won't open that port to the public, and only those allowed in your network can access the machine.

If you want to read into the security of Zerotier itself, here is a link to that. It's far more complex than anything I could go over.

Conclusion

I believe that zerotier is great for small users, all the way up to big buisness that wants the convenience of private networks, but without the complication, and downsides to a VPN. It's fast, secure, and flexable, as any good networking tool should be.

Bonus section: Where I use Zerotier

I use zerotier in a lot of places, and run many networks. A non exhaustive list would be

• Nginx reverse proxy through zerotier
• Accessing an NFS server remotely, securely
• "LAN" gaming with friends who join a network
• Accessing my 3D printer remotely without opening a port
• SSH between all of my controlled machines no matter what firewalls are in place

Why is everyone excited?

Docker is, simply put, a container. How is this at all exciting? Think about any time you set up a system, and how long you spend setting it up. No matter if it's a web server, a build environment or any other system service. Do you want to do that all over again when you move systems? What about updating your operating system under it, and having to deal with config file changes, and the other cruft that gets left behind, and causes problems over time? Not having to deal with any of this is why people like docker.

What docker is, and more importantly, what it's not.

Some people assume that docker is just another container like a virtual machine. While it is true that docker will spin up a minimal Linux environment, it does this every single time that the docker instance is started, and when stopped, it throws it all away. This seems like it would be a massive pain to update every single time you wanted to add new content to it, but this wasn't overlooked when Docker was designed.

Getting started with Docker

The getting started link for Docker is here so you can install it properly no matter what platform you are on. Once docker is up and running, feel free to come back. Otherwise, let's see what docker can do for you.

Basic example

Give this command a run in a terminal/command prompt, then navigate a web browser to http://127.0.0.1 and you should see a web browser running.

docker run -d -p 80:80 docker/getting-started

Lets break down what that command is doing. You docker is the basic command to directly control Docker. run tells it that you want to run something inside of docker. -d tells docker to run it in the background, as a daemon. -p 80:80 forwards the port 80 from your local machine, where docker is running on, to port 80 in the container. This is the standard HTTP web port that allows you to access that server. The url could have been typed http://127.0.0.1:80, but 80 is implied for HTTP, so it didn't need typed. docker/getting-started is the docker image that is running inside of the container, and that image starts the web server that you see when you load the web page.

Docker-compose

Typing commands can get very confusing, especially as things get more complex, so I would recommend learning docker-compose early. You may need to install it separately on your system. The same command as above would be saved as a file called docker-compose.yml and is yaml formatted as the filename implies.

---
version "2.3"
services:
    getting-started:
            image: docker/getting-started
            ports:
                80:80
                

Make it useful

Docker compose files can be brought up by running docker-compose up -d. The -d will run it in the background. If you omit this, you can see what's going on, and stop it with ctrl c like any normal command.

---
version: "3"  # Specifies the compose version

services:  # The list of services are below
    nginxBlog:  # The only service will be this blog, running on nginx
        image: nginx  # Runs on the nginx official image
        container_name: blog  # Sets the name of the container to keep track easier
        ports:
            - 80:80  # opens up port 80 to let you access the blog
        volumes:
            # Passes through /mnt/data/blog from the host to where nginx expects a web page to be
            - /mnt/data/blog:/usr/share/nginx/html  # passes through /mnt/data/blog from the host to where nginx expects 
        restart: unless-stopped  # Automatically restarts the service on restart of docker, or host reboot, ect

This is how this blog gets to you (partially). What happens if I start this docker container on another machine? I have to upload my blog to all of them and keep them in sync? Not at all. It just takes an edit to how docker has access to data.

---
version: "3"  # Specifies the compose version

services:  # The list of services are below
    nginxBlog:  # The only service will be this blog, running on nginx
        image: nginx  # Runs on the nginx official image
        container_name: blog  # Sets the name of the container to keep track easier
        ports:
            - 80:80  # opens up port 80 to let you access the blog
        volumes:
            # This time we will pass the volume from below through to the container.
            - blog:/usr/share/nginx/html  # passes through /mnt/data/blog from the host to where nginx expects 
        restart: unless-stopped  # Automatically restarts the service on restart of docker, or host reboot, ect
        
volumes:
    blog:
        driver: local
        driver_opts:
            type:nfs
            o: "addr=192.168.25.51"
            device: ":/mnt/data/blog"

This will let docker manage a mount though NFS (assuming it's available on that machine). This means that you can use use this file with any computer that has access to that NFS mount.

Docker swarm

Speaking of managing multiple computers with docker, why bother choose what goes where for things you don't care about what machine hosts it? Docker swarm has you covered. I'll link the getting started guide here as reference, but I'll highlight some of the things I was confused about going in, as well as some other benefits to running a swarm.

Short list of upsides

• High reliability services. Can run multiple instances in case one is restarting/crashing/overloaded
• Automatically can use any node that joins the swarm with little to no effort after joining
• Can easily reboot machines for updates, and docker containers stay up, or automatically come back up on another machine

Questions I and others have/had

Q: How do I know what IP address to access?

A: Docker swarm includes a load balancer. You can access any machine in the swarm on the port you want, and it will serve it to you properly.

Q: What if I need something specific for the container?

A: Docker swarm includes concepts of tagging. You may want to separate things that need ARM or x86_64 CPU's. You may also tag a system as "low_ram" for things like a raspberry pi so a minecraft server doesn't decide to try to start there. Tags are arbitrary, so you can craft it to your needs.

Q: How do I update the container?

A: You don't think about it most of the time. The implied tag for containers is :latest, which will automatically pull down the latest version of the container every time it's restarted. If you lock a version, you know when to change the version tag, but docker does the rest for you.

Other uses for docker

Docker isn't limited to running services for servers. You can use it as a container to test applications without installing them on your system directly. This is also great for dev environments as there's no more "works on my system" bugs due to the nature of everything inside of the container always being the same on all systems. I'll link an article on how to do this with Rust, but it should translate to most projects well.

Conclusion

Docker is a great way to carry around services, build environments, and many other things that help you think less about the "how do I get there" and more about whatever your goal is. When I wanted to spin this blog up, I didn't care that I had to use a web server, or how it went together. I just started an nginx instance in docker, and I am done forever. Hopefully this has helped you see what's so great about docker. Feel free to reach out with questions, and I'll update the page with any common ones.