Anycubic ACE Pro Reverse Engineering

This GitHub repository is aimed at coordinating reverse engineering efforts and documented the ACE Pro. If you'd like to contribute, please open an issue or contact me!

The goal of this repository is to allow use of the ACE Pro on printers using open source firmware.

Currently in progress:

• Writing an emulator for development
• Writing a Klipper plugin for the ACE

We currently want:

• People with an ACE connected to a printer running open source software

Related projects:

• How to root your Kobra 3: https://github.com/systemik/Kobra3-Firmware
• How to root your Kobra 3 (old): https://github.com/Bushmills/Anycubic-Kobra-3-roote
• Custom Kobra 3 firmware: https://github.com/utkabobr/DuckPro-Kobra3

Other discussions:

• https://github.com/Bushmills/Anycubic-Kobra-3-rooted/discussions/2
• https://github.com/printers-for-people/catboat/issues/42

Everything here is licensed CC0 aside from mjson which is licensed MIT.

Thanks

Thanks to the following people who have contributed to reverse engineering this project (Alphabetical order):

• avx for for doing manual tests and strace dumps
• Bushmills for for helping root the Kobra 3
• Spitko for providing access to an ACE for development
• wiltwong for cross-compiling debugging binaries

Development instructions

If you want to help with development in this repository, here's some quick notes. A Linux development system is required, WSL may work (untested).

First, run the emulator in one terminal:

./emulator/main.py

Second, build and run the tests:

cd tests
./build.sh
./main

Third, build the tests for the Kobra:

cd tests
./build_cross.sh

You should have a 'main_armv7' file you can copy to the Kobra to run and test the actual ACE. Running these tests on actual hardware may cause unexpected behaviour, so be prepared to report bugs.

If you find anything interesting in your tests, please submit the test output as a GitHub issue.