BufferBuddy

BufferBuddy aims to prevent print quality issues when printing over USB with Octoprint. Designed for Marlin with ADVANCED_OK support, but may work for other firmwares that also support ADVANCED_OK output.

WARNING: This plugin is still considered experimental and may cause your printer to hard lock. I am not responsible for any damage this plugin may cause. You have been warned.

Please ensure you read the Requirements section below. This plugin requires ADVANCED_OK to function.

Some of you may have noticed print quality issues when printing curved lines over USB, which tends to manifests as zits on the surface layer of a print. I personally noticed this when I upgraded to Cura 4.7.1, which has a bug that generates extremely dense gcode for curves (potentially exacerbated by certain printer profiles that incorrectly sets too fine of a resolution, which is due to another bug fixed in 4.7). This can be addressed by printing directly from the SD card, however I like the convenience and flexibility of Octoprint.

This is caused when the planner buffer runs out of instructions during a print, which causes printer movement to stall, however the pressure in the hotend will cause undesired extrusion.

Octoprint's default behaviour is to send a command, and wait for an ok response from the printer before sending another command. Generally, this is fine and reliable, but during small segments (usually seen in curves), this can cause the planner buffer to underrun.

It's important to note that increasing BUFSIZE does not improve print quality when printing over USB with Octoprint by default as the command buffer never holds more than one pending command with Octoprint's default behaviour, but this plugin aims to address that.

For more information, see my blog post on how I diagnosed the print quality issue when printing with Octoprint, and how I added buffer monitorin to Marlin, which was instrumental in understanding how to fix the issue.

Do I need it?

If you're not encounting print quality issues, you probably don't need it.

If you have ADVANCED_OK output, you can tell if you're running into the issue by observing the number after P. For a Marlin configuration where BLOCK_BUFFER_SIZE=16, if you see P15 during a print, that means the planner buffer was empty before it received the command, which means the printer did not have any movement planned and would have stalled.

For a better understanding if your buffers are underrunning, consider using my M576 command available as pending pull request.

How it works

This plugin uses the ADVANCED_OK feature in Marlin where the ok output is extended with ok N<line number> P<planner buffer remaining> B<command buffer remaining> to understand the current state of the printer's buffers.

This enables the plugin to understand how many more commands we can send to the printer, and we do so by causing Octoprint to send more commands before it's received an acknowledgement by messing with its internals and thus can break if these internals are changed.

The core algorithm is as follows:

• It parses the ok output to understand:
  • How many free slots are left in the printer's command buffer by looking at B
  • How many lines are currently in-flight to the printer by checking Octoprint's comm._current_line and comparing to the N<line number> reported in the ok output.
• If:
  • there is more than one slot in the buffer (which we try to keep available), and
  • we don't have more than BUFSIZE-1 lines inflight
  • and we haven't triggered an extra send too recently
• Then:
  • Check Octoprint's queue to make sure there's something to send
    • If not, trigger comm._continue_sending to add something to the queue
  • Trigger the next command to be send by unblocking the _send_loop by calling comm._clear_to_send.set()

Limitations

This plugin can only try to keep the command buffers filled.

It cannot make your printer process more commands than the processor is capable of, nor fix underlying communication issues between Octoprint and your printer.

Requirements

• Marlin 2.x, with ADVANCED_OK support, as per defined in Configuration_adv.h
  • It's important that you also change TX_BUFFER_SIZE or USART_TX_BUF_SIZE depending on your configuration to at least 32 as ADVANCED_OK sends more data.
  • This plugin is more effective with a higher BUFSIZE. The default of 4 is generally not enough for this plugin to be useful.

Tested with

This plugin has been tested with my Ender 3 v2 running Smith3D's Marlin fork which includes improvements specifically for the Ender 3 v2, but should work for any Marlin 2.x firmware with the appropriate configuration.

If you have had success with other printers, please send a pull request and add the details below.

• Ender 3 v2, Marlin-Smith3D 2.0.x-13: BUFSIZE=16, BLOCK_BUFFER_SIZE=16, USART_RX_BUF_SIZE=64, USART_TX_BUF_SIZE=64
• Ender 5, SKR Dip Board, Marlin 2.0.7.1: https://twitter.com/RobbertMuller/status/1321336649050193920
• ANET A8 Marlin 2.0.7.2 BUFSIZE=8, BLOCK_BUFFER_SIZE=32, TX_BUFFER_SIZE=64, EMERGENCY_PARSER, ADVANCED_OK

Plugins

• Octolapse: BufferBuddy works with Octolapse, but take note that a M400 is sent before snapshot, so the buffers need to be refilled after the snapshot.

Setup

Install via the bundled Plugin Manager or manually using this URL:

https://github.com/chendo/BufferBuddy/archive/main.zip

Configuration

TODO: Describe your plugin's configuration options (if any).