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HelixScreen

Printing

The Printing category contains settings that affect how prints are configured and displayed.

Toolhead Style

Section titled “Toolhead Style”

Choose the toolhead icon shown on the Home Panel and Print Status screen. Options:

Option Description
Auto (default) HelixScreen detects your toolhead from the printer database or Klipper config
Stealthburner Voron StealthBurner toolhead
A4T Armored Turtle toolhead
AntHead AntHead toolhead
JabberWocky JabberWocky toolhead

Most users can leave this on Auto. Change it if HelixScreen picks the wrong icon or if you’ve swapped to an aftermarket toolhead.

Note: The native styles (Default, Creality K1, Creality K2) are auto-detected from your printer and don’t appear as choices in the dropdown.

G-code Preview

Section titled “G-code Preview”

Choose how the G-code of the active print is visualized:

Option Description
Auto (default) HelixScreen picks the best mode for your hardware — interactive 3D on capable devices, falling back to lighter modes on slower ones
3D View Interactive 3D rendering of the toolpath
2D Layers Flat per-layer view — lighter on the GPU than 3D
Thumbnail Only Shows just the slicer-embedded thumbnail, no live toolpath rendering — the lightest option

Use a lighter mode if your hardware struggles with 3D rendering.

Z Movement

Section titled “Z Movement”

Controls how Z-axis movement is displayed in the motion controls.

Mode Behavior
Auto (default) HelixScreen auto-detects based on your printer type (bed-slinger vs CoreXY vs delta)
Bed Moves Z controls labeled as bed movement (bed goes down = nozzle moves up relative to bed)
Nozzle Moves Z controls labeled as nozzle movement (nozzle goes up = away from bed)

This only changes the direction labels in the UI — the actual G-code sent is the same. Use this if auto-detection picks the wrong style for your printer.

Machine Limits

Section titled “Machine Limits”

Tap to open the Machine Limits overlay. A banner at the top reminds you: “Changes are temporary and reset on printer reboot.” These sliders override your Klipper config for the current session — useful for testing or troubleshooting motion issues. To make permanent changes, edit printer.cfg directly.

Each setting has a slider, with the current value shown on the right in a tappable field:

Tap the value to type an exact number. Sliders are quick but coarse — Max Acceleration spans 500–50000 over a few hundred pixels, so landing on exactly 3000 by dragging is luck. Tapping the value opens a numeric keypad where you type the number you actually want.

Setting Range Description
Max Velocity 50–1000 mm/s Maximum toolhead speed
Max Acceleration 500–50000 mm/s² Maximum acceleration
Accel to Decel 500–50000 mm/s² Acceleration-to-deceleration limit (caps how aggressively moves slow down)
Square Corner Velocity 1.0–20.0 mm/s Maximum speed carried through square corners. Accepts half steps (5.5) — type them on the keypad.
Extrude Speed 1–50 mm/s Feedrate used for manual extrude/retract actions

Extrude Speed is saved. Unlike the motion limits above, the Extrude Speed value is a persisted HelixScreen setting — it is remembered across restarts and applies to the manual extrude/retract controls.

Below the adjustable sliders is a read-only Config-defined section showing your Max Z Velocity and Max Z Accel, which come from your Klipper config and cannot be changed here.

Reset: the Reset button at the bottom restores the motion limits to your printer’s original configured values.

Retraction Settings

Section titled “Retraction Settings”

Only shown when firmware retraction ([firmware_retraction]) is configured in Klipper.

Tap to open the retraction overlay. Configure G10/G11 firmware retraction parameters. Changes apply immediately and can be adjusted mid-print for tuning.

As on Machine Limits, each value is shown in a tappable field — tap it to type an exact number on the numeric keypad instead of hunting for it with the slider. The distances accept two decimals (0.85 mm).

Parameter Range Description
Enable Retraction On/Off Master toggle for firmware retraction
Retract Length 0.00–6.00 mm Amount of filament to retract. 0.4–2 mm for direct drive, 4–6 mm for bowden.
Retract Speed 10–80 mm/s Speed of the retraction movement
Unretract Extra 0.00–1.00 mm Extra filament to prime after retraction to compensate for ooze
Unretract Speed 10–60 mm/s Speed of the prime (unretract) movement

Material Temperatures

Section titled “Material Temperatures”

Configure preheat presets for different filament materials (PLA, PETG, ABS, TPU, etc.). Each material can have:

  • Nozzle Temperature — Target extruder temperature
  • Bed Temperature — Target bed temperature
  • Preheat Macro — A Klipper macro to run when preheating this material
  • Macro Handles Heating — If enabled, the macro is responsible for setting temperatures. If disabled, HelixScreen sets temperatures first, then runs the macro as an additional step.

Editing materials and brands by hand

Section titled “Editing materials and brands by hand”

Everything on this screen and in the filament catalog (the brand and material picker) can also be edited as a file. On most installs both files live in ~/printer_data/config/helixscreen/, so Mainsail or Fluidd can open them from their config file browser. The copies in the install folder’s config/ directory (for example ~/helixscreen/config/) are links to the same files.

Brands and products: user_filaments.json. This holds the products you add or change on top of the built-in catalog. It is a JSON list of products:

[
  {"id": "mybrand-pla-basic", "brand": "MyBrand", "name": "PLA Basic", "type": "PLA",
   "nozzle": 215, "nozzle_min": 200, "nozzle_max": 230, "bed": 60}
]
  • id, brand, name and type are required. The id must be unique; lowercase with dashes is the convention.
  • nozzle, nozzle_min, nozzle_max, bed and density are optional. Anything you leave out comes from the material type’s defaults, including your own type overrides below.
  • To change a built-in product, use its id and include only the fields you want to change. The built-in list is assets/filaments.json in the HelixScreen install folder; read it for ids, but don’t edit it, because updates replace it.
  • type must be one of the materials HelixScreen already knows (the names in the Material Temperatures list). A product with an unknown type gets no default temperatures, so set all of them yourself.
  • Temperatures set on a product win over the type defaults and over your type overrides.
  • Once you save a product from the screen, HelixScreen rewrites the file as {"filaments": [...]}, keeping any orca_type_map you had. Both shapes are fine to edit.

Restart HelixScreen after editing so every screen picks up the change. Before this file was linked into printer_data, it lived only in the install folder, where an update from Mainsail or Fluidd deletes it. If you added products on an older version, copy the file somewhere safe before updating. If the file stops parsing, HelixScreen ignores it until it’s fixed, and the next save from the screen copies it to user_filaments.json.bak before starting fresh.

Material type temperatures: settings.json. Changes you make on the Material Temperatures screen are stored under material_overrides, keyed by the material name exactly as it appears in the list. Only the fields you set are stored:

"material_overrides": {
  "PLA":  {"nozzle_min": 205, "nozzle_max": 225, "bed_temp": 65},
  "ABS":  {"chamber_temp": 50, "preheat_macro": "PREHEAT_ABS", "macro_handles_heating": true}
}

The keys are nozzle_min, nozzle_max, bed_temp, chamber_temp (0 means no chamber heat), preheat_macro and macro_handles_heating. Which material each preset button uses is stored in preset_materials, a list of four entries such as {"type": "PETG"}.

Stop HelixScreen before editing settings.json, then start it again. HelixScreen writes the whole file whenever it saves a setting, so an edit made while it runs can be overwritten.

Timelapse

Section titled “Timelapse”

Only shown when the Moonraker-Timelapse plugin is installed.

Tap to open the Timelapse Settings overlay. Configure how HelixScreen records timelapse videos of your prints.

Setting Options Description
Enable Timelapse On/Off Master toggle for timelapse recording
Recording Mode Layer / Hyperlapse Layer captures one frame at each layer change — best for most prints. Hyperlapse captures frames at fixed time intervals — better for very long prints.
Framerate 15 / 24 / 30 / 60 fps Playback speed of the rendered video. 30 fps is the default.
Auto-render video On/Off When enabled, automatically renders a video file when the print completes

A quick timelapse toggle also appears on the print status panel, so you can enable or disable recording without leaving the print view.

Changes are saved immediately and sent to Moonraker. If the timelapse plugin is not yet installed, HelixScreen shows an Install Wizard that walks you through the SSH commands to set it up — see Advanced > Timelapse for details.

For browsing and playing recorded videos, see Advanced > Timelapse Videos (covered in Advanced > Timelapse).

Macro Buttons

Section titled “Macro Buttons”

Tap to open the Macro Buttons overlay. Configure quick-action buttons and standard macro assignments.

Quick Buttons

Section titled “Quick Buttons”

These macros power the buttons you see on the Controls and Filament panels:

Button Where it appears What it does by default
Cooldown Preheat widget (when heaters are on), Filament panel Turns off extruder and bed heaters
Load Filament Filament panel Runs LOAD_FILAMENT
Unload Filament Filament panel Runs UNLOAD_FILAMENT
Custom Macro 1 Controls panel Runs HELIX_CLEAN_NOZZLE (label: “Clean Nozzle”)
Custom Macro 2 Controls panel Runs HELIX_BED_LEVEL_IF_NEEDED (label: “Bed Level”)

Cooldown behavior: When you preheat a material using the Preheat widget on the home or controls panel, the button automatically switches to Cool Down while any heater target is above zero. Tapping it runs your configured cooldown macro. This is especially useful if your cooldown needs to do more than just turn off heaters — for example, turning off chamber heaters, bed fans, or recirculation fans.

You can customize any of these. Each button has a label (what the button says) and G-code (what it runs when tapped). The cooldown macro can be a simple G-code string or a multi-line sequence:

SET_HEATER_TEMPERATURE HEATER=extruder TARGET=0
SET_HEATER_TEMPERATURE HEATER=heater_bed TARGET=0
SET_FAN_SPEED FAN=bed_fan SPEED=0

For advanced configuration via settings.json, see the default_macros reference.

Standard Macros

Section titled “Standard Macros”

HelixScreen auto-detects common macros from your Klipper configuration (e.g., it recognizes CLEAN_NOZZLE, NOZZLE_CLEAN, and similar naming patterns). You can override any auto-detected assignment:

Slot What it controls Common auto-detected macros
Load Filament Filament load operations LOAD_FILAMENT, M701
Unload Filament Filament unload operations UNLOAD_FILAMENT, M702
Purge Nozzle purge/prime PURGE, PURGE_LINE, LINE_PURGE, PRIME_LINE
Pause Print pause PAUSE, M600
Resume Print resume RESUME
Cancel Print cancel CANCEL_PRINT
Bed Mesh Bed mesh calibration BED_MESH_CALIBRATE
Bed Level Manual bed leveling BED_SCREWS_ADJUST, SCREWS_TILT_CALCULATE
Clean Nozzle Nozzle cleaning CLEAN_NOZZLE, NOZZLE_CLEAN
Heat Soak Chamber heat soak HEAT_SOAK

If your printer doesn’t have a matching macro, some slots fall back to HelixScreen helper macros (installed via Settings > Advanced > Install HelixScreen Macros). Leave a slot empty to disable that function.

Load Filament and Unload Filament on a multi-filament printer: left on (Auto), these two drive your filament system directly rather than running a macro. Choose a macro yourself and it takes over — your macro runs and the filament system’s own handling is skipped for that operation, so anything it would have done becomes your macro’s job. Set the slot back to (Auto) to hand the operation back. The other slots are unaffected. See Customizing which macro runs.

Looking for Load/Unload/Purge button customization? See the Filament guide for a step-by-step walkthrough, including how these buttons interact with AMS systems.

Per-Material Preheat Macros

Section titled “Per-Material Preheat Macros”

You can also assign a custom Klipper macro to each material preset (PLA, PETG, ABS, TPU). This is useful when preheating requires more than just setting temperatures — for example, turning on bed fans for ABS or starting a chamber heater.

Configure per-material macros in Material Temperatures (above). Each material can have:

  • Preheat Macro — A Klipper macro to run when preheating this material
  • Macro Handles Heating — If enabled, the macro is responsible for setting temperatures. If disabled, HelixScreen sets temperatures first, then runs the macro as an additional step.

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