The Raspberry Pad 5 from Bigtreetech looks at first glance like a 5-inch touch screen… Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Raspberry Pad 5 can be an ally for many of your projects. In our case, we are going to focus on its use as a Klipper host for our printers.
On the back we see that it has a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, or CM4 from here on, which allows you to directly connect MCU modules with CM4 format. In addition, we also have an arsenal of connections such as HDMI port with 2K support, a GPIO, USB-C port, USB 2.0 connectors, CSI interface and even an RJ-45 Ethernet connector for connection to our wired networks.
IMPORTANT!!!
As for the graphic part of the screen, we have an IPS panel with up to five simultaneous keystroke captures and a resolution of 800×480 pixels. It is also appreciated to have three buttons to control the brightness and rotation of the screen.
The Raspberry Pad 5 can be an ally for many of your projects. We are going to focus on its use as a Klipper host for our printers.
Previously we have told you that the Raspberry Pad 5 has a connector for the connection of a CM4 module, but… What exactly is a CM4?
Basically, a CM4 module is a small board that incorporates an ARM Cortex-A72, the same one used by a Raspberry Pi 4. These modules are manufactured for, as in our case with the Raspberry Pad 5, another controller that provides interfaces or functions such as USB, video outputs, etc.
Taking into account the limitations and price of Raspberry Pi, the use of these CM4 modules together with our Raspberry Pad 5 will allow us to have, for our case, a powerful Klipper host thanks to the CM4 and capable in options thanks to the Raspberry Pad 5 part of connections and screen.
BIQU/Bigtreetech have their own online store where you can buy the Bigtreetech Pad 5 directly. In any case, we provide you with some links to other reference stores:
Now that we have all the information of our Raspberry Pad 5 it is time to start preparing it to install Klipper
The first step to perform is the installation of the CM4 module which, together with the screws supplied, we will anchor in the CM4 socket of our Raspberry Pad 5
CM4 module orientation:
Continuing with the CM4 module it is important to identify what type of module we are going to use, basically we have 4 combinations with different configurations.
On the one hand, we have to identify if our CM4 is the version with eMMC or Lite, since it will affect the way of installing our Klipper.
Below, we detail the process to install Klipper in both CM4 Lite modules and modules with eMMC. We will use our favorite distribution MainsailOS.
If our module is a CM4 Lite, without eMMC, we must install our MainsailOS image using our SD:
The Raspberry Pad 5 has 3 LEDs for system diagnostics that can help us identify problems:
If the WiFi configuration process fails, we can put the SD back on our computer and adjust the file wpa_supplicant or you can use the raspi-config command.
In the event that our CM4 module has eMMC we must perform the installation in a different way from the previous one following these steps:
Installing the OS for Klipper in the SD will not work if our CM4 module has eMMC.
If we use Mac or Linux it will be a little more laborious to use RPIboot because we will have to compile it, from the previous link for Mac & Linux versions we have more detailed steps:
IMPORTANT!!!
sudo wget https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/cmio/dt-blob-disp1-cam1.bin -O /boot/dt-blob.bin
In case we want to use the HDMI connection again, we must delete the /boot/dt-blob file.bin
dtoverlay=dwc2,dr_mode=host
cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/jordanruthe/KlipperScreen.git
cd ~/KlipperScreen
./scripts/KlipperScreen-install.sh
We advise you to add this section at the end of your moonraker.conf:
If everything has gone well, we can access the Klipper web interface from our browser from any device on your network and access through KlipperScreen using your screen.
Los siguientes pasos serán crear tu printer.cfg, crear y aplicar el firmware Klipper a tu electrónica si no lo tiene todavía y encontrar el serial_ide para nuestro printer.cfg.
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