Finally got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 4. I installed MainsailOS and I followed this guide and got Klipper set up and running in a few hours.

I literally doubled my print speed in the slicer settings, which is giving me a 30-40% reduction in print times and the print quality is actually better at the same time… The only concern I have now is how the whole table vibrates when printing so fast 😅

Managing the printer through the moonraker interface on Mainsail is really nice. I also set up Obico for remote monitoring away from home with an old webcam.

The issues I had during setup were pretty few, but I’ll list them here:

  • The USB webcam I had did not work at all out of the box, but that was quickly fixed by installing Crowsnest - after install the camera (Logitech C270) was working perfectly
  • After installing Crowsnest, the camera worked, but the web interface was no longer connecting to Klipper - I found out this was because I set up my Raspberry Pi with a non-default username, and the Crowsnest installation had apparently updated my moonraker.conf to look for Klipper in the default location. Just had to update klippy_uds_address: /home/pi/printer_data/comms/klippy.sock to have my username instead of pi
  • The last problem I have is that I’m having so much fun printing at turbo speed through the slick web interface that I’m burning through my filament too fast and I need to order more soon.

Next on the list is a Raspberry Pi cam (the Logitech C270 is on its last leg) and some LED lighting to get a better view of the prints.

It really feels like I got a whole new printer. I am really impressed with it and I would definitely recommend to anyone with a cheaper Marlin printer and at least a little bit of Linux experience.