Klipper: The Gateway Drug to Voron

I bought my first 3D Printer at the beginning of 2019. An Ender 3 Pro. I played with it for a few months. Installed OctoPrint on a Raspberry Pi and then quickly lost interest. About 2 years later I decided to dust it off and upgrade it a bit.

The first upgrade was a CR Touch Auto Bed Leveling Sensor. This required a 32 bit board. My Ender 3 Pro is an older printer so it came with an 8 bit board. While I was at it I ordered a metal extruder to replace the plastic one it came with and a dual z-axis upgrade kit.

Installing the CR Touch required a firmware upgrade. I decided to compile Marlin with the necessary changes myself, instead of using the Creality supplied CR Touch firmware. This turned out to be relatively easy. But as always I was bored again. Bored with stability, I needed something else to tinker with. I needed a second printer.

I ordered an Ender 3 S1 Pro. Initially I had issues with OctoPrint and the S1. This was due to Creality's version of the Marlin Firmware. This gave me the perfect excuse to try Klipper.

I ordered a Sonic Pad thinking this would be the easiest way to install Klipper on the S1, but again I ran into issues. Advertised features failed to work and the pad was very buggy. What worked for some didn't work for me. I started looking into running Klipper off of a Raspberry Pi and decided to give it a go with the Ender 3 Pro. Within an hour I had Klipper running successfully via the Fluidd interface. The issues I had with the Sonic Pad were non existent on the Pi. To make the change permanent I printed some parts and got a 5" screen and installed KlipperScreen.

After the success with the Pi, I made a second one to use on the S1. I know that Klipper is capable of running more than 1 printer, but since I wanted it mounted on the printer I decided to have 1 Pi per printer.

A few months into Klipper and now I have found the newest thing I never knew I always needed, a Voron!