Flashing a Creality 3 S1 pro with Klipper and use it with MainSails

By CLN Posted on 14/10/202230/11/2022 Category :

I’ve recently acquired a Creality 3 S1 pro, with the intention of flashing it with Klipper

If this is the first time flashing a printer with klipper read me:

Your attached display/controls probably won’t work (you will have to attach a (touch) display to your Pi and look at KlipperScreen
Some Creality printers have odd SoC/CPU’s shipped, verify yours!

these are my notes.

On this page

Abstract of steps to take

Flash raspberry with Mainsails
Use Mainsails to compile the firmware
Flash firmware to the printer
Setup a printer.cfg config

Things to get

Get a Creality 3 S1 pro
Get a raspberry pi.
Get a micro SD card. (for the raspberry)
Get a USB A to USB C cable (to connect to the raspberry to the printer)
an SD card (to flash the printer) [should come with the Creality]

Getting started with the raspberry

Pick the most recent version if there is a choice

Head over to advanced options, we want to:

Set a hostname
Setup WiFi
Setup SSH
Set a password

Don’t change the username, MainSail needs “pi” as the username

Put the SD card in the Pi, and let it boot/set up.

Setting up mainsail

Browse to http://mainsail.local/

make sure to get mainsail fully updated under “Machine > Update Manager”

Let’s get our printer flashed with Klipper!

before mainsail can communicate with the 3D printer we need to flash Klipper firmware onto the machine (communication happens with a USB-A to USB-c cable on an S1 Pro)

SSH into the host with “pi” and the password you picked whilst flashing (default: raspberry)

execute “make menuconfig” from /home/pi/klipper

this will launch the interactive GUI to config/compile the firmware

protip: check the config of your printer over at github, usually the comments up top give the config we need

the S1 (pro) config shows us this ( source file )

# This file contains pin mappings for the stock 2021 Creality Ender 3
# S1 & S1 Pro. To use this config, check the STM32 Chip on the
# Mainboard, during "make menuconfig" select accordingly either the
# STM32F103 with "28KiB bootloader" or the STM32F401 with
# "64KiB bootloader" and serial (on USART1 PA10/PA9) for both.

# For a direct serial connection, in "make menuconfig" select
# "Enable extra low-level configuration options" and  Serial
# (on USART2 PA3/PA2), which is on the 10 pin IDC cable used
# for the LCD module as follows: 3: Tx, 4: Rx, 9: GND, 10: VCC

# Flash this firmware by copying "out/klipper.bin" to a SD card and
# turning on the printer with the card inserted. The filename
# must be changed to "firmware.bin"

# With STM32F401, you might need to put "firmware.bin" in a
# folder on the SD card called "STM32F4_UPDATE" in order to flash.

# See docs/Config_Reference.md for a description of parameters.

Lets select the correct micro-controller first [2nd option], in case of the S1 Pro you pick STM32

I opened my printer to make sure I have the ARM7 STM32F401

Make sure to switch the bootloader to 64KiB

Set up the communication interface (going off comments in our config file)

it will take a small while

let’s copy the firmware to a directory we can access from the mainsail webserver

cp out/klipper.bin /home/pi/klipper_config/klipper.bin

Locate our firmware and right click it, and download it.

on our SD card make a new folder named “STM32F4_UPDATE” and place your klipper.bin in there, make sure to date the file, as the printer can be picky about how the file is named.