helixscreen

A dashboard for your printer

HelixScreen is a modern touch interface for Klipper based 3D printers. The pitch is that your printer can do more than the stock screen allows, and the features trapped in a browser tab, such as bed mesh visualization, input shaper graphs, multi material management, and print history, become available at your fingertips. It is described as fast and light enough to run on hardware you already own, whether that is the printer's onboard system on a chip, a Raspberry Pi from a drawer, or a separate mini PC. You can run it directly on the printer or point a remote instance at the printer's Moonraker service over the network, which suits a floor standing printer with a screen on your desk. Resource use is a central claim: about 15 megabytes of RAM on embedded targets and about 75 megabytes on disk, which the README contrasts with heavier touchscreen UIs. That footprint means a Creality K1 or Flashforge AD5M, or an older Pi, is enough, and there is no need to buy new hardware. The first run wizard discovers the printer's capabilities, so setup does not start from a blank configuration file. The claim of running on hardware you already own lowers the cost of adopting a nicer interface for an older printer. Instead of buying a new touchscreen, a maker points the app at the printer they have and gets bed mesh and graphs on a device that was otherwise idle.

Features and supported hardware

The feature list is broad. The dashboard is a customizable multi page grid with drag to reposition, edge resize, and a catalog of more than 30 widgets, including temperature graphs, fan arcs, and power toggles. The printer database covers more than 80 models and auto detects hardware. Multi material support spans seven filament system backends: AFC with Box Turtle and ViViD, Happy Hare with ERCF, 3MS, Tradrack, and Night Owl, ACE for the Anycubic ACE Pro, AD5X IFS, Creality CFS, Snapmaker U1 with RFID spool recognition, and tool changers including MedusaHC hotend changers, with full Spoolman integration. Exclude objects gives a tap to exclude overhead map during prints. The look includes light and dark themes with 17 presets and GPU accelerated blur. Nine languages are supported: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese. On the hardware side, tested platforms include Raspberry Pi 3, 4, and 5, BTT pads, Creality K1 and K2, Flashforge AD5M and AD5X, Elegoo Centauri Carbon, x86 mini PCs, and macOS or Linux for development, with Android as a remote client. The comparison table sets RAM at about 15 megabytes versus about 50 for KlipperScreen. The wide printer database means a new user often finds their model already known, so setup skips manual configuration. Where a printer is not listed, the wizard still probes its capabilities, which keeps the experience close to the supported cases without leaving the user to edit config files by hand.

Installation and development

Installation is a one line curl script that detects the platform, downloads the correct binary, sets up a service, and launches the wizard. The same script supports an update flag and a version flag to pin or roll back to a known good release, and a clean flag wipes settings while leaving Klipper and G-code untouched. HelixScreen is also available as a KIAUH extension, and Flashforge AD5M owners get a ready made firmware image with HelixScreen pre configured. Android users download an APK from the latest release since the app is not on Google Play yet. For developers, the build uses make, and the test suite spans more than 5000 cases across more than 600 files covering printer state, UI components, XML parsing, and multi material. XML layouts hot reload on native builds, so editing a ui_xml file updates the running UI. The license is GPL v3, with one clear exception: lib/helix-xml is MIT, kept as a permanent fork of the declarative XML engine that LVGL removed from core after version 9.5, so the engine remains usable as a standalone library. Credits note inspiration from GuppyScreen and KlipperScreen and AI assisted development with Claude Code. The hash locked dependency set and the project gate keep the build reproducible across machines. A contributor who runs the full test suite before a pull request can trust that the interface and the printer logic were both exercised, which matters for software that controls real hardware.

Editorial conclusion

HelixScreen is licensed under GPL v3 and written in C++17 with an LVGL 9 XML interface, while its helix-xml engine stays under the MIT license.