Initial Startup & Commissioning Guide¶
The following guide will help you on the journey to multicolor printing after you have physically completed the assembly of your AFC unit. Non-Armored Turtle designs will need to refer to their respective assembly manuals for the physical assembly of the unit, but the software setup and configuration should be mostly similar across all supported units.
Warning
ViViD heater temperature sensor is currently not supported in Kalico. Currently there is a pull request waiting to be merged in to support this sensor.
Prerequisites¶
Calibrate/tune existing printer extruder¶
If you are installing this on a new printer or extruder (including FilamATrix)
ensure you have calibrated your printer/extruder before introducing AFC/multicolor printing. If your extruder rotation
distance is off by a large factor, this will cause issues with defining values such as tool_stn and others later on
in the configuration.
It is a lot easier to do some of the calibrations (such as rotation distance) BEFORE installing your AFC unit.
Our recommended guide to follow for calibration is Ellis' Print Tuning Guide.
Ensure minimum system requirements¶
The AFC Klipper Add-On requires a minimum Klipper/Kalico version of 0.12, as well as a corresponding klippy-env Python environment of at least version 3.8.
Minimum Klipper Requirements
If you are running a version of Klipper/Kalico older than 0.12, you will need to update your system before proceeding.
The AFC Klipper Add-On will not work with older versions. You must be on or past commit id 1d92be71 of Klipper.
This was released on Jan 18th, 2024.
If you are on Klipper/Kalico 0.12, but running ~/klippy-env/bin/python --version returns version 2.7.x, you can
recreate it with the following:
sudo service klipper stop
mv ~/klippy-env ~/klippy-env2.7
virtualenv -p python3 ~/klippy-env
~/klippy-env/bin/pip install -r ~/klipper/scripts/klippy-requirements.txt
sudo service klipper start
After recreating it, you may need to reinstall any custom add-ons, such as Klippain Shake&Tune, TMC Autotune, etc.
Ensure you have a clean, functioning Klipper install with all of these minimum requirements met before proceeding to the next step.