Creality announced the new Sonic Pad today, a Klipper-based gadget for 3D printing. The announcement came alongside the company’s first public mention of the new Ender 3 Neo series that is refreshing its original Ender 3 lineup with modern hardware.
Details about the Sonic Pad are sparse, with Creality simply calling the hardware a “highly integrated 3D printing gadget based on Klipper”.
That’s all we know for sure. Were we to entertain a guess, we assume the Sonic Pad will be a single-board computer, as is required to run Klipper’s software, with a touchscreen running one of the popular Klipper interfaces such as Mainsail or Fluidd. But, for now, that’s just speculation.
This hardware coming directly from Creality could dramatically simplify the Klipper installation process, at the very least for its own products. Right now, many of Creality’s LCD interfaces – such as those included on the Ender 3 V2 – are useless once Klipper is installed. It’s honestly a good argument for the upcoming Ender 3 Neo to still have a monochrome 12864 display – those will work with Klipper – but the Sonic Pad may present a simple upgrade path.
Klipper is a unique 3D printer firmware that takes a different approach from more widely adopted software like Marlin by using a second device more powerful than the 3D printer’s control board to handle all the computational heavy lifting. The control board instead is used to carry out simple commands.
If we’re correct that the Sonic Pad is a processing device for Klipper, it could make Klipper far more accessible for all, especially those daunted by its installation process. Installing Klipper’s control board component is a simple affair, like flashing any 3D printer firmware, but the more powerful processing component involves installing Klipper software called “Klippy” on a Linux-based device (usually a Raspberry Pi).
But, once again, this is all speculation. We’ll have to wait until Creality reveals more about its new Klipper product to say what it is with any certainty.
Lead image source: Creality
License: The text of "Creality Teases Klipper Firmware With New “Sonic Pad”" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.