Kalico¶
There is a medium term plan to migrate all users (K1 Series and RPI Series) over to a Simple AF Kalico fork
Note
For new installations of Simple AF for RPI, Kalico is already the default!
Why?¶
Because Klipper keeps refactoring stuff and making it really hard to rebase, especially our non critical mcu feature we cherry picked from Kalico to Klipper makes updating to later version of Klipper very difficult.
We have decided that it would just be easier to use Kalico directly and we don't have to worry about merge conflicts for Kalico features.
Forking Kalico?¶
We have three different Kalico forks:
- https://github.com/pellcorp/kalico - K1 Series Kalico which runs on Creality OS
- https://github.com/pellcorp/kalico-rpi - RPI Series Kalico which runs on SBC (like a RPI)
- https://github.com/pellcorp/k1-kalico-firmware - This fork is for building Creality firmware which gets copied to the pellcorp/kalico fw/ directory
We have some extensions which are not upstreamed and likely might never be upstreamed, we can probably use kalico plugins for much of this, but for simplicity reasons it should be possible to switch between kalico and klipper without any loss of functionality, once a migration is complete to Kalico this would be less of an issue and we may retire at least our kalico-rpi fork.
K1 Series specific extensions¶
- Kalico requires python 3.9, and we are stuck on python 3.8, python 3.8 compatibility changes.
- There is no gcc available on Creality OS so we pre-compile c_helper.so.
- We ship firmware in the fw/ directory of the klipper fork, which the S13mcu_update makes use of.
- Input shaping by default causes OOM so we have added a max_velocity_factor to speed up input shaping to avoid running out of ram
K1 and RPI extensions¶
- Include virtual pins into our fork
- Extended fan extension for M106 to support targeting different fans with the P argument
- Support a no_reconnect flag for non critical mcus, although this might be retired due to recent stability changes in Kalico
- Expand environment variables in gcode shell commands
How do I install?¶
For a new installation you can pass the --kalico argument on the --install command, otherwise you can switch afterwards.
How do I switch?¶
On both K1 and RPI Series you can switch between kalico and klipper very easily, first of all make sure your pellcorp/creality repo is fully up to date, run:
Then to switch to Kalico, you can run:
To switch back to Klipper, you can run: