Tried Klipper. It is not for me

I think I must finally admit defeat trying to get Klipper/Mainsail working acceptably on my Ender 5 Pro with its v4.2.7 board and BLTouch installed.
I followed the steps in Klipper Ender 5 - Installation and Setup Guide | Obico Knowledge Base to ‘make menuconfig’ with the settings recommended but with the baud rate set to 115200.
I have a printer.cfg that starts with
“This file contains pin mappings for the Creality Ender-5 Pro with "v4.2.7" board. To use this config, during ‘make menuconfig’ select the STM32F103 with a "28KiB bootloader" and serial (on USART1 PA10/PA9) communication”
On trying to connect Mainsail reports “ERROR Mcu ‘mcu’ : Unable to connect”.
It took me two weeks to work through all the various errors that Mainsail threw at me but I finally got the Pi4B, Klipper, Mainsail, the Ender 5 Pro and BLTouch to work together.
It took me another week of studying posts on Klipper websites and tweeking the many settings in Printer.cfg to get to the point of a test print.
Klipper is fast but that produces problems. The clunk from the stepper motors during the stop/start of normal operation is very annoying but was mitigated by reducing the speed to 50%.
The time taken to fine tune Printer.cfg was a valuable learning experience but I still ended up with spongy prints and a hankering for the simplicity of Octoprint. I decided that further time spent solving that problem was just not worth it. Undoubtedly Klipper/Mainsail offers finely granulated control of the print process but for me, a home hobbyist, the hassle is just too much.
The whole experience has taught me just how good Octoprint is. The installation on the Pi is easy. The UI is clean, intuitive and does everything needed. Full marks to the developers and their maintenance process. I encourage all those who use it to financially support Octoprint.

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Sorry, what has this to do with OctoPrint?

Klipper is a different pair of shoes.

Thanks for your reply. I thought reporting my experience trying Klipper might be useful for other Octoprint users. Perhaps observations on trying Octoklipper will be more to your liking.

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I'm running Klipper with OctoPrint with no issues at all on a IDEX printer with BLtouch and two independent Z axes.

Maybe you should have asked at the Klipper forum for help.

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I for one appreciate this post, because I often get a lot of crap from Klipper fanboys who love telling me that OctoPrint is "bloated crap" and obsolete. So reading that you enjoy the experience with my work of love just made day :green_heart: Thank you @davidball!

With that being said - and I sadly need to say this - everyone should just use whatever works best for them! There's no need for tribal wars about the preferred print host or firmware :wink:

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Live and let live and each to their own. I am going to try Octoklipper and see if it is easy to install and use

Support the people of Ukraine and Palestine in their fight against tyranny for if they fail we are next.

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I am sure they would have helped but I was not prepared to spend any more time troubleshooting the installation when a switch back to the more simple solution of Marlin and Octoprint is easy. I learned a lot from the attempt to get Klipper to work but the gains were not worth the hassle.

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Maybe I missed something, but this is klipper.
Link
and nothing else.
I'm running klipper with octoprint and octoklipper for years with my own plugins on my printer and also with some klipper mods on my MPCNC.

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I wanted to evaluate Klipper.

Using the Raspberry Pi OS (legacy 32 bit) Lite image, Kiauh, a configuration file ‘printer-creality-ender5pro-bltouch-v4.2.7.cfg’ and the wealth of information on the Klipper and Octoprint forums I flashed Klipper on my Ender 5 Pro and installed Moonraker, Mainsail, Fluidd, Crowsnest and Octoprint on a Pi4B. I found that the USB link would not work until I set the baud rate to 115200 in the Printer.cfg file (having specified that rate in the ’make menuconfig’ procedure). Once that was done the communication came online. Mainsail, Fluidd and Octoprint happily coexisted and were accessible on the ports chosen during Kiauh and the default port (5000) for Octoprint.

Both Mainsail and Fluidd worked as expected and Crowsnest found the attached USB camera without any problems. However this was not the case with Octoprint which apparently uses a different streaming setup. I was not able to solve that issue.

Similarly both Mainsail and Fluidd display a very easy to interpret height map but I could not get Octoprint Bed Visualizer to display a mesh after mapping the six points on the bed.

I found that, compared to the clean simple UI of Octoprint, both Mainsail and Fluidd UIs are fussy and not ergonomic. Choosing the Extruder and Bed temperatures in the Klipper UIs is overly finicky compared to the two mouse clicks that do the job in Octoprint.

If you need to have a screen full of information about the many parameters the Klipper UIs present then fine but I found them overly complicated and unnecessary. I can understand that many users like to have that level of control and when actually printing Klipper seems to be faster than the Marlin/Octoprint combination, which may be important in a commercial environment, but for me, a home hobbyist, it is not.

This is definitely a case of horses for courses, but for me, the hoops I had to jump through to get Klipper installed and tuned was not worth the effort when the Octopi distribution available in the Pi Imager is so convenient.

I am puzzled by the remarks critical of posting this opinion on the Octoprint forum and will post it on a Klipper forum too if it makes the critics happy.

Don't know if you got what klipper is. Kipper is a Firmware and nothing else. Moonraker, Mainsail, Fluid and the other stuff is not. The very common way to get klipper from klippers view is to clone it to an octoprint image.