Glance — at-a-glance KlipperScreen UI

Why

KlipperScreen is excellent as a complete touch control panel for Klipper. It gives you access to everything, and its panel framework makes projects like this possible with just a few drop-in files.

But during active operation, state and progress is hard to judge from across the room, and the grid-based UI is at times clunky to operate. This project tries to address this by replacing a few key screens, while most everything else stays available through the standard KlipperScreen panels.

Each screen shows one large figure with a phase color — amber for heating, cyan for leveling, green for printing, violet for done, red for error. The progress rail and minimal layout make the printer's state readable from meters away, without walking up to the screen.

Glance is built on KlipperScreen, not against it: five drop-in panels, one theme, and a small patch. KlipperScreen handles the long tail of printer controls; Glance is for everything you want to know at a glance.

Screens

Home — the idle screen: printer state at a glance, one tap to reprint a recent job	Heating — amber while the heaters climb, with live progress
Leveling — cyan while the gantry levels	Meshing — cyan while the bed is scanned
Printing — green progress with time left, plus speed and Z-offset tweaks mid-print	Paused — pausing brings up filament controls
Done — violet when the print is finished	Move — tap or drag on the maps to move the toolhead
Preheat — drag a slider or pick a material profile; the graph shows the last six minutes	Extrude — feed or pull filament; repeated taps queue up, and nothing moves while the nozzle is cold

How to install

Glance is an add-on, not a standalone app: it requires a working KlipperScreen (v0.4.x) already installed and showing on your printer's display. SSH onto the device running KlipperScreen, then:

cd ~ && git clone https://github.com/mathiasm74/klipperscreen-glance.git
cd klipperscreen-glance && ./install.sh

The installer copies the panels, theme, and fonts, applies the small KlipperScreen patch (and tells you if your KlipperScreen version has drifted), and places glance.cfg next to your printer config. Two manual edits finish the job:

1. printer.cfg — include the Glance macros:

[include glance.cfg]

That brings in _HEAT_WAIT (heating that narrates its progress), filament load/unload helpers, and heat-soak bookkeeping. Then let your PRINT_START tell the screen what it's doing: heat with _HEAT_WAIT instead of M190/M109, and label the setup steps with M117:

_HEAT_WAIT HEATER=heater_bed TARGET={BED_TEMP}
_HEAT_WAIT HEATER=extruder TARGET={EXTRUDER_TEMP}
M117 Leveling gantry
QUAD_GANTRY_LEVEL          ; or your G32 macro
M117 Scanning bed mesh
BED_MESH_CALIBRATE
M117                       ; clear -> the green PRINTING phase

(There's a complete PRINT_START example at the bottom of glance.cfg.) The standard M190/M109 commands block the printer from updating any display while they wait — _HEAT_WAIT is what makes the amber heating percent possible at all.

2. KlipperScreen.conf — select the theme, and optionally define the material profiles the Preheat screen offers:

[main]
theme: glance
auto_open_extrude: False

[preheat PLA]
extruder: 215
bed: 60

For updates through Moonraker's Update Manager:

[update_manager glance]
type: git_repo
path: ~/klipperscreen-glance
origin: https://github.com/mathiasm74/klipperscreen-glance.git
managed_services: KlipperScreen
install_script: install.sh

Will it work on my printer?

Glance adapts to what your printer actually has. Buttons for features your machine doesn't support simply don't appear: no filament load/unload macros, no filament buttons; no quad gantry leveling, no QGL button; no probe, no Save Z. There's nothing to configure — the screens look at your printer's setup and show what applies.

One thing is worth adopting for the full experience: glance.cfg (the installer puts it next to your printer config, ready to include). It teaches your print-start routine to narrate what it's doing, which is what gives the job screen its live heating percent and the leveling and meshing phases. Without it everything still works and prints still track progress — you just miss the play-by-play during warm-up, because standard heat-and-wait commands block the printer from updating any screen until they finish.

Other screen sizes

The layout is designed at 1024×600. Panels route their absolute pixel sizes through a shared scale (min(w/1024, h/600)) at runtime, and install.sh --width 800 --height 480 generates a proportionally scaled stylesheet for e.g. a 5" HDMI display. That's mechanical scaling of one source design — no forked copies — so expect it to be usable but worth a fine-tuning pass on real hardware.

License

AGPL-3.0, matching KlipperScreen, whose panel framework this builds on. The bundled Anton and Space Grotesk fonts are under the SIL Open Font License (see src/fonts/).