I ordered and received an SKR mini E3 2.0 board for my Ender3, as it sounded like a drop in replacement. I did drop it in yesterday, but my Extruder refused to move. I tried updating the stock firmware from the BigTree Git, but something went wrong. I put a .bin on the SD and power it on. It changes the .bin to a .cur, but the screen just stays blue forever.
Have I bricked this? Need help, Please!!
PS- I’m a noob, but I’m willing to work on it and learn… Just need some direction!
Thanks!
First question is did you check and re-check the wiring of the board? I did this exact upgrade (which is awesome btw, so good call in the first place) and I struggled to get some of the wires to talk nicely. I think I damaged a connector a bit removing the hot glue that comes on the stock board to hold connectors in place. I would check that first due to my previous experience.
Second question is what .bin file did you put on the SD card? I have a BLTouch and like to edit the firmware to my liking so I was playing with that anyway, but I have heard that the github files aren’t always the best.
Thanks! I removed the board and put the stock back in. It seems to work fine, so I think the connectors are all good.
At this point, I want to understand how to communicate with the board to make sure it actually has firmware on it so I can make sure I can communicate with it.
I tried the base .bin from the Bigtree site for the v2.0 (without any add-ons like BL Touch), then back to the one that came on the SD card with the board.
Well, not related to your question, but what are you going to do with the ender board? Seems like they aren’t good for much else, so I’m going to leave my ender pretty much stock and build another printer. I would totally put an SKR in it if it didn’t mean scrapping the ender board.
That seems like expected behavior. The fact that it changed to .cur means it actually flashed. It is very hard to brick these, unless you short something while it is powered on.
Where are you with it now? Did you ever get the screen to work with the new skr board? You probably just need to enable the screen in the firmware, or find some firmware that has it already enabled. Are there creality groups somewhere that recommend this board, and might have some preconfigured bin files that work with that screen?
You’re in for an adventure. You can really play around with it. Like I said, they are hard to really break with firmware, so explore. The skills you learn will be very useful for other arduino and Marlin projects.
That’s what I don’t know how to do. I can search for a known good .bin for my setup, but I won’t know until I plug it back in. I would have assumed that if the firmware was working (as expected), I’d be able to connect to it via USB. Unfortunately, it won’t even appear to my OS as connected. I’m assuming USB power will be sufficient to power the board (not the motors, etc). I don’t want to keep unplugging / plugging the connections to the board until I know I’m making some sort of progress…
It depends on the board. On my skr, there is a jumper to dwitch between usb and 12V power. But any firmware should connect. You might need drivers in windows (but I’m no help there either, I use Linux).
I would suggest unplugging all your motors, endstops, heaters, thermistors. But keep 12V connected and usb.
Just tried that. nothing but 12v and the screen. Same outcome. the board has 2 solid red leds and that’s it. Screen was still all blue and no luck connecting via USB. : (
I just emailed BTT to see what they can. Not optimistic…
This makes me leery of ordering an SKR turbo for my Primo, but the cost difference is significant!
@Magilla I never plugged my SKR into my computer, I just used the method that you did to flash the firmware (as @jeffeb3 mentioned that since it had changed to a .cur it actually flashed sucessfully). This worked well for me.
I honestly would recommend that you start with a fresh copy of Marlin and go from there. There are lots of good tutorials on YouTube University about marlin and how to get your modified version onto an SKR board. Teaching tech does a great job imo. Also there is info in the SKR git if I remember correctly.
I recommend this because I learned a ton about the firmware as I struggled through that process. Just my take because once you know the ins and outs of it it’s a lot easier to diagnose/fix problems.
If you’re starting from another firmware, I would start from V1CNC_Rambo_Dual on Ryan’s github. There are several non-obvious changes for a cnc machine that would be done for you. The rest would be skr specific changes and to remove the rambo specific changes. Should be about 5-10 lines different (motherboard, serial ports, driver types, tmc stuff off the top of my head).
