Using GuppyKE

Using OpenKE — Your Screen, Explained

This page is a plain-English tour of what's on your printer's screen and what each tool actually does. No jargon, no assumptions. If you've just installed OpenKE and you're looking at the screen wondering "okay, what does all this do?" — start here.

OpenKE replaces the stock Creality interface with a faster, fuller one. Everything runs on the printer itself — you don't need a phone or computer for day-to-day printing (though Mainsail in a browser still works great for remote control).

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Getting around — the five tabs

You navigate with a small row of icon buttons (the tab bar). There are five screens; tapping the already-active one resets it (Macros jumps back to Favorites, Console back to the terminal):

• 🏠 Home — temperatures, a live temperature graph, and quick buttons (move/home, extrude, fans, light, and Files to start a print). This is your day-to-day screen.
• Macros — your gcode macros, with favourites and collapsible parameter rows.
• Console — type gcode directly; a drill-down command browser with history.
• Tune — the calibration & quality toolbox (bed mesh, Z-offset, Axis Twist, input shaper, skew, TMC, limits…).
• Settings — WiFi, system info, Spoolman, and the in-app updater.

Your home screen

Where you land. At a glance:

• Temperatures — nozzle, bed, and chamber/MCU, each tappable to set a target (or use presets).
• Live graph — those temperatures plotted over time.
• Quick actions — buttons to home/move the toolhead, extrude/retract filament, control fans and the case light, and open the Files browser to print.
• While a print runs — a compact overlay shows progress, layer, and time left; tap it for the full print-status screen (with pause/resume/cancel).

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The basics: printing something

1. Load a file. Slice in your slicer (OrcaSlicer, Cura, …) and copy the .gcode to the printer — over the network (Mainsail/Fluidd), or on a USB stick plugged into the printer. New files show up in the Files list automatically.
2. Start it. Open the file and tap print. The print status screen shows temperatures, progress, time left, current layer, and a live readout of speed/flow/Z-offset.
3. Adjust while it prints. Almost everything on the status screen is tappable — tap a temperature to change it, tap the Z-offset to baby-step the first layer, etc. (More on that below.)

🔒 You can't break a running print by poking around. Anything that would disrupt a live job is either blocked or asks you to confirm first. Explore freely.

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Everyday controls

• Temperatures — tap the nozzle or bed reading to set a target, or use the presets. There's a chamber/MCU temperature shown too.
• Move — home the printer, jog X/Y/Z, disable the motors.
• Fans & LED — part-cooling and other fans get sliders (or on/off for simple ones); the case light toggles on/off.
• Filament — load/unload helpers heat up and feed/retract for you.
• Extrude — manual extrude/retract once the nozzle is hot.

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The Tune tab: calibration & quality tools

One of the five tabs — the toolbox for taking a printer from "works" to "dialed in." You won't need most of these day-to-day, but when you do, they're right on the screen (no PC required).

First-layer & dimensional accuracy

Tool	What it does	When to use it
Bed Mesh	Shows the bed's height map as an interactive 3D surface (rotate/zoom) or a table.	To see how flat your bed is, or after re-meshing.
Z Offset	Live first-layer baby-stepping — Raise/Lower in steps from 0.001 up to 0.05 mm. Saves automatically.	First layer too squished or not sticking. Nudge it mid-print and watch.
Axis Twist	A guided 5-point wizard that fixes a first layer that's good in the middle but uneven left-to-right.	The classic "one side squished, other side lifting" problem bed mesh can't fix. → full guide
Skew	Corrects parts that come out as a slight parallelogram instead of square. Print a frame, measure, type in 3 numbers.	Functional parts that need to be truly square. → full guide

Print quality & motion

Tool	What it does	When to use it
Fine Tune	Live speed, flow, Z-offset, and pressure-advance while printing.	On-the-fly tweaks mid-print.
Input Shaper	Runs a resonance test (needs the accelerometer) and shows frequency-response graphs, then applies the result.	Reduce ghosting/ringing and unlock faster, cleaner prints.
Belts / Shake	Belt-tension check and axis excitation.	Comparing left/right belt tension, diagnosing a noisy axis.
Retraction	Live firmware-retraction tuning (length/speed).	Stringing or blobbing, if your slicer uses firmware retraction.
Limits	Max velocity, acceleration, square-corner velocity.	Push speed up, or calm the printer down.

Drivers & power

Tool	What it does	When to use it
TMC Autotune	Automatically optimizes your stepper drivers (quieter, cooler, smoother) from the motor type. Pick the motor + a goal and it tunes every boot.	Set once and forget — but the button is greyed out until a small add-on is installed. See the TMC Autotune guide.
TMC Metrics	A live read-out of the stepper drivers — current, temperature, and internal settings. A diagnostic dashboard.	Chasing skipped steps or a hot driver. Otherwise ignorable.
Power Settings	Power-device toggles and Power-Loss-Recovery (resume a print after a power cut).	Recovering an interrupted print.

💡 You don't have to understand all of these to print well. The two that fix the most common complaints are Axis Twist (uneven first layer) and Z Offset (first-layer height). Start there.

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Settings & system

• Network — connect to WiFi, see your IP, and a Low Latency toggle for a snappier remote connection (handy if Mainsail feels laggy or video stutters). Switching it on turns off the WiFi radio's power-save, stops it sleeping when idle, disables background network scans, and turns off Bluetooth — on the KE, WiFi and Bluetooth share a single 2.4 GHz radio and antenna, so leaving BT running (it's unused here) makes WiFi periodically yield to it and stutter. The setting sticks across reboots and network changes; turn it off to go back to stock (which also re-enables Bluetooth).
• System info — temperatures, load, versions.
• Macros / Console — run any gcode macro, or type commands directly (a drill-down command browser with history).

Spoolman (filament tracking)

If you run a Spoolman server — a filament inventory that knows your spools and how much is left on each — OpenKE talks to it right from the printer screen, so you don't need a browser to manage filament:

• See your spools in a table — name, material, colour, and remaining weight & length. At a glance you know if a spool has enough left for the next print.
• Set the active spool with one tap (and archive empties, or show archived, to keep the list tidy).
• Usage tracks itself — once a spool is active, the filament a print uses is subtracted automatically, so each spool's remaining amount stays accurate without you weighing anything.
• Wrong-filament safety net — OpenKE shows a "Use this filament?" confirmation of the active spool before a print starts and before a manual load, so you catch "oops, that's the PETG, not the PLA" before it ruins a print instead of after.

The whole thing is optional: no Spoolman server, no Spoolman panel — nothing else changes.

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The big three setup guides

Most people only need to do these once. They're written step-by-step for non-programmers:

1. Perfect first layer (Axis Twist + KAMP) — fixes left-to-right first-layer unevenness. The single highest-impact tweak for the KE.
2. Skew correction — makes functional parts come out truly square.
3. TMC Autotune — quieter, cooler motors (and how to enable the greyed-out button).

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A note on firmware updates

A few of these features rely on small additions to the printer's system files. A Creality firmware update can wipe those. It's not a disaster — each guide has a quick reinstall section — but it's why you should bookmark the setup guides and re-run them after any firmware update.