I own an Ender 5+ and I have purchased the Sonic Pad and the Octopus Pro. The latter as it supports up to 60 VDC for the stepper motor drivers TMC5160.
If I understand the development of the 3D Print related technologies right I should have a powerful computing engine, i.e. The Raspi 5 4GB as the computing needs is moved to an external unit and the board within the 3D Printer has mainly the task to drive the stepper motors.
Am I right?
I think the Pi 5 is overkill to be honest. A pi 4 2GB model works wonderfully for OctoPrint and has plenty of power.
Thanks for your response jneilliii. Aparently I have not been able to express myself correctly. For a printer to be able to print faster usually, To my understanding, an upgrade to a more powerfull board, is one of the reasons, so that that board can executed G-Code more G-Code instructions and in this way make faster printing possible. The Sonic Pad and other similar solutions have the G-Code processing mainly done off the printer and the board in the printer is basically only occupied to run the hardware so that instructions from the external board are printed.
I have purchased the Octopus board as it had at the time I did purchase it the strongest controller buildin. The other reason was that I could supply to it the 48VDC power to the stepper motor drivers making it possible fort the stepper motors to run faster.
Now the solutions like the Sonic Pad run i.e. Klipper much faster and offloading the controller in the printer. So for me, if I have understood it correctly, the higher proccessing power that the Octopus board offers is not really relevant, only its capacity to feed 48VDC to the stepper motor drivers.
Is my understanding correct?
Your understanding is not completely correct. The board itself can have Marlin on it and with the proper buffer configured that can run just as fast as klipper. All the hype around klipper was really based on older 8 bit printer motherboards that were slower. The modern day 32 bit motherboards don't have much of an issue keeping up. In either case, the sonic pad is the compute power in the klipper scenario, because it's already pre installed on it iirc.
In either case, a pi 5 is still overkill.
Oh, that gives me shivers...
It is to say about the Sonic Pad, that Cr@lity took Klipper, crippled it down to something that has nothing to do with genuine Klipper any more. It may behave as it, but maintenance is impossible. And all this with disregarding the GPL-3.0 license (as they already did with Marlin).
Over at the Klipper forum we advice against the Sonic Pad: