Marlin 2.1.2 launched this past Sunday bringing input shaping to the widely used 3D printer firmware. The addition is perched at the top of a list of a dozen new features and is the focus of the release’s accompanying text.
Input shaping, or resonance compensation, is a calculation that attempts to cancel out a 3D printer’s vibrations and eliminate visual artifacts like ringing from a printed surface. Print defects like ringing are typically the first barrier hit when attempting to increase printing speed, and so compensating with input shaping helps users to print much faster than they’re otherwise able — especially when combined with other calculations like linear advance.
Input shaping has been one of the major draws to the Klipper firmware over the more common Marlin, but extra hardware required to install Klipper — usually a single-board computer — may give more users pause when input shaping is available on a more familiar firmware.
Information on Marlin’s input shaping, now assigned to the M593 command, is currently limited, and the release stresses that the feature is still considered experimental; so be sure to report back any issues on the Marlin Firmware GitHub. Unfortunately, it also appears that input shaping on Marlin is limited to manual calculation for now. No plugging in an accelerometer to take care of vibrations for you, it seems you’ll have to measure a ringing tower to make use of this feature. Fortunately, Klipper has a detailed guide on the process. But, of course, the console commands its walkthrough gives you won’t be applicable to Marlin.
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License: The text of "Marlin 2.1.2 Adds Input Shaping Support" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.