Wahhh! (bricked my ender - just need somewhere to whine)

So yeah… I decided to get my ender 5 pro on Klipper, as the firmware on it didn’t have skew adjustments enabled, and my calilantern was right on the edge of what I’d be comfortable with for printing up the LR4 parts.

AnywayI somehow had a complete brain fart, so when I reached down to turn off the printer to put in the SD card, I realized about 3 milliseconds too late that I’d already done that step.

Yup, powered it off in the middle of the installation, and now it’s dead.

On the bright side, my birthday is on the 17th and I’m pretty sure I’m getting a new 3d printer so this should only put me behind a week or so…

You cannot be the first to have done this, there has to be a way to fix it.

at the most you may need a tty cable (I think that is what it is called).

try it again, I cannot see where this will brick it. Not at least when I google it.

do you think it is dead just because the screen does not work?

Do you get a serial port on boot ?

Ender 5 has the ender 3 board, the ones I saw at least. 4.2.2 or 4.2.7

Maybe try and search if the controller has a “DFU” mode
Sometimes by booting while holding teh reset button or something similar, you can flash it from scratch

Even if the controller is bricked, you might only need to replace the controller, rather than replacing the whole printer
The BTT SKR Pico is a great value to replace a board with a klipper-comaptible one

You gotta try harder than that to hard brick it. It’s still recoverable, though you may need DFU or JTAG hardware worst case. The other comments have good next steps, but the board isn’t scrap.

Of course I could replace the board for $30-$40, or buy tag hardware and waste many hours learning how to set up and use that, but at the end of the day I’d be another 5-10 hours in to getting an ancient, slow, and not very good 3d printer working.

So I did what my years of experience have told me to do - try the same steps again after a good night’s sleep!

I did everything from scratch the same way I did it 10-20 times yesterday, but this time it worked!

Clearly I screwed something up each time yesterday, but Hallelujah! Where’s the Tylenol?

At the end of the day I wasn’t going to buy JTAG hardware or spend 5-10 hours on this board, when a new one is $30-$0, and the printer is probably not worth much more than $75.

Still hoping for a new 3dp for my birthday next week, but if the wife winds up picking something else for me, at least I’ll still have this!

6 Likes

My wife is very good at choosing stuff she thinks I’d like instead of asking me. :sweat_smile:

3 Likes

For posterity’s sake, I’m answering some of the great questions y’all brought up, even though the crisis has been averted.

It’s the one thing you’re warned about when upgrading these boards that can only be upgrade via SD Card, if the upgrade gets turned off at the wrong time, the bootloader can get borked.

Nope, it was because it wasn’t communicating over the USB port

It showed up, but wouldn’t respond to anything

Yup - absolutely. If I had borked the boot loader, the internets say I could have fixed that with a copy of the boot loader and a JTAG programmer. I have neither, and have an LR4 I’d rather spend my time planning for :grin: :grin:

Thank you all!

Kim goes back and forth on this - one year will be a very thoughtful but useless gift that she realizes is a bust (like a membership to a local club that I only wind up visiting once for example), then she’ll course-correct on that and get me exactly what she knows I want and am expecting. This should be the latter year :rofl:

3 Likes

ONLY if you’re actually uploading the bootloader instead of just the firmware. Most sane systems don’t couple these.

1 Like

I know the scare of that word lol.
Bricking a car ecu and having to open it up and bdm flash it or trying the gqx-4.
One time I didn’t have the key off long enough and it was half bricked.

1 Like

Depending on where you are at I might take that E5 pro off your hands lol. After doing a Mercury One.1 conversion on mine its been a BEAST of a printer.

3 Likes

That looks hella cool - After I get a new daily printer dialed in, I may play around with a conversion and some mods on this one…

Yeah I have done an Ender 5 Plus and an Ender 5 Pro now. They sure wake them up. And if you put the right hotend/extruder on them they can really move some plastic! I bought the kits from Fabreeko for both of mine. I also did the Hydra conversion on the Pro to get rid of the cantilevered bed. Its running a 275x275 bed on it now. Basically you are only reusing the frame on them. And maybe electronics depending on what you are running. Need a 6 driver board for doing the Hydra (5 if you go with canbus/usb on the toolhead)

Whoah, just looked at the price for that kit, and holy crap. That’s close to the cost of a brand new flashforge adventurer - it’d have to be ridiculously good to make it worthwhile

Or you have to be like me and would rather build than buy. Its not always the cheapest option for sure LOL. But I end up with printers set up exactly how I want them

1 Like