Klipper MoTD

klipper-motd is configurable and theme-able Message of The Day for Klipper with installer and configurator.

The Why • The How • FAQ • Contribute

The Why

As I SSH into my printers quite frequently, I got bored with the standard, generic, wall-of-text MoTD (Message of The Day) where only relevant information displayed was Last login (one line out of 9) and wanted to give my printers a bit more flair. While at it, I thought it'd be even cooler if I make it more flexible and reusable on different Klipper flavors.

The How (a.k.a. Getting Started)

Preparation

klipper-motd requires that your shell window is at least 120 columns wide. Some clients will autoadjust when resizing the window and some won't. One of those programs is PuTTY. The columns width can be adjusted in PuTTY settings

Installation

First, SSH into your Raspberry and download this reposiitory

git clone https://www.github.com/tomaski/klipper-motd.git

Make the setup.sh executable

chmod +x ./klipper-motd/setup.sh

and run it with proper flag

sudo ./klipper-motd/setup.sh --install

After that it's just a matter of running the configurator, where you can adjust the MoTD to your liking

sudo motd-config

Configuration

Theme (flavor)

Is pretty self explanatory: each has its own icon and accent color. Currently supported "flavors":

• Annex
• BTT
• Fluidd
• Klipper
• Mainsail
• OctoPrint
• RatOS
• Voron
• Fysetc
• Radxa
• Pine64
• OrangePi

Available variants

Variant 1 (labels)

Variant 2 (values, default)

Highlighted updates

Turned on (default)

If OS updates count is 0, it'll use variant settings. For values greater than 0 will use highlight (orange) color

Turned off

Will always use the variant settings.

Removal

If you no longer wish to use this MoTD simply run setup.sh command with --remove flag and the script will remove all klipper-motd files from your system and revert any changes made during installation.

sudo ./klipper-motd/setup.sh --remove

after that, remove the klipper-motd directory

rm -rf ./klipper-motd/

Update

To check for updates just run

sudo ./klipper-motd/setup.sh --update

If update is available you will be asked if you want to install it.

FAQ

Q: Why are the logos so blurry/pixelated?

Keep in mind that terminal is, in it's entirety, text based. Being able to produce images in it requires some very complex wizardry and AFAIK this is as good as it gets.

Q: How to add or change services?

Currently, the configurator does not support editing services list, so if you wish to make adjustments, you'd need to do it manually.

Warning service names are case sensitive! Run systemctl list-units --type=service to see which services are known to the system and what their names are. You need to use that name (without .service)

sudo nano /etc/motd.update.d/10-klipper-motd

The services to be displayed are stored here

Warning names must be in double quotes and the space between elements is mandatory

SERVICES=("klipper" "moonraker" "crowsnest" "KlipperScreen")

Ctrl+o to save. Then Enter to confirm and Ctrl+x to exit.

Q: How to edit colors?

Editing colors is also not supported in configurator, so in order to tweak the theme to your liking, you'd need to make manual edits

sudo nano /etc/update-motd.d/10-klipper-motd

the color definitions used, are clearly described inside this file. This link might come in handy for color codes bash colors cheat sheet

Q: How to add more logos?

First of all, you need util-say which needs OpenJDK (as util-say is Java based), Perl, coreutils and texinfo. So first, install the needed packages

sudo apt-get install imagemagick openjdk-17-jdk coreutils perl texinfo

then download the util-say

git clone https://github.com/maandree/util-say
cd util-say
make

after that you can download your image

wget URL_OF_YOUR_PICTURE -O myimage.png

and convert it to text-based representation.

./ponytool --import image --magnified 20 --file myimage.png --balloon n --export ponysay --platform xterm --chroma 1 --right 0 --left 0 --top 0 --bottom 0 > converted_image

The text-based image will be saved to converted_image file. To view it, simply type

cat converted_image

If the size is wrong, you need to adjust the --magnified parameter. For images that are 1024px x 1024px the magnification of about 20 is good starting point. Smaller image sizes need lower magnification value.

The recommended image height is 27-28 lines/rows. To quickly check how many lines the image consists of, run this command:

cat out/converted_image | wc -l

If the created image is almost the recommended size, but tiny bit too short, play with the padding settings --top 0 --bottom 0 of the ponytool command above.

Q: How to display the MoTD at-will?

It is possible to output the MoTD contents at any time and not only on login. To do that, use following command

sudo run-parts /etc/update-motd.d

If you think you'll be using it more frequently, you can register a custom command for it:

Warning Following commands apply only to the standard terminal shell. If you're using something else, like ZSH for example then you need to make changes to the corresponding configuration files for that shell.

nano ~/.bash_aliases

then write following content to that file (you can replace klipper-motd with your own name)

alias klipper-motd='run-parts /etc/update-motd.d/'

then just save that file: Ctrl+o to save. Then Enter to confirm and Ctrl+x to exit. After that, reload terminal settings:

source ~/.bashrc

Now everytime you run klipper-motd command, the MoTD will be displayed in the shell.

Want to contribute?

Contributions are always welcome! Please have a look at the awesome tutorial How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub

Credits

klipper-motd is heavily inspired by Street Fighter MOTD by Igor Rzegocki for its picture section and Fancy MOTD by Bazyli Cyran for the sysinfo section.

License

klipper-motd is free and open-source software licensed under the MIT license