Bigtreetech Ender 5 Plus Upgrade: Boards Compared (Part 1)

so in my last few videos I've spent a lot of time really trying to understand Marlin 2.0 understanding the new features what works together and what doesn't and now that I'm done with all of that research I think it's finally time to install some new main boards in this printer so in this video I have the big tree Tech III mini V 2.0 and I have the big tree tech s KRV 1.4 turbo both of these from a feature perspective are really good options for this printer and I'm going to be comparing it to the silent board which is already installed in this machine now in this video I'm going to go step-by-step how to install these how to install a new display which you got a couple of different options for and the big thing is I really want to go over how to read one of these wiring diagrams so that not only do you understand how these boards are installed but in the future when you want to install these you can read one of these schematics and get this board installed for yourself so without further ado let's get started on these upgrades that's what I'm doing right here today on Kersey fabrications let's go future Chris here I wanted to cut in and let you know that after filming all of this content I realized I had way too much for just one video so I've divided it up into four different parts to make it a lot easier for you to digest now in this first part I'm going to be doing a comparison of the different boards available and show you what the similarities and differences are between them to help you decide which boards you may want to choose in part 2 I'm going to be doing a detailed installation of the mini III version 2.0 and then in the third part I'm going to be doing an installation of the V 1.4 turbo then in the fourth part I'm going to take a look at the test prints that I've pulled off all of my boards and compare the performance of them is there a difference between printing with one board over another board when it actually comes to the results of your prints so I hope you enjoy the format that I've set up for you here and let's get started so as I mentioned I've really spent a lot of time in my past few videos really going through Marlin 2.0 understanding what the features are what they do how they work what works together what doesn't and I really wanted to walk you through that whole debugging process number one it was taking up a lot of my time number two I thought that that process would be educational to people that may not have worked on debugging firmware before so if you're interested in that I'm gonna have the playlist up here it's gonna have a couple of videos that I did covering the Marlin process as well as an interview that I did recently with Scott lateen who is the project maintainer of the marlin project I hope you enjoy those videos now for this video I'm not actually going to be covering my Marlin configuration what I'm going to have for you after you've seen all this go check out the description I'm going to have the configuration files all set up in a git repo over at github I'm going to have just the configuration for files for you if you just want to download those and I'm going to have binaries for you whereas if your setup is as close to stock as mine is if all the motion is relatively the same then you'll be able to just download that binary put it on an SD card and put it on your board you'll be ready to go with no additional configuration if there are some additional asks from the community on can you enable this feature and if you can enable that feature I will also work to enable those and put those binaries down below now I don't plan on doing a long-term maintenance on this firmware so as we move forward if there are new versions of Marling you feel like you need or features you need you know ping me on it I'll see what I can do but please take those binaries take those configuration files use those and starting points to get yourself up and running so without further ado let's take a look at these main boards and check out the difference so the first thing I wanted to look at was I generated this awesome table and I'm gonna put it up here on the screen that actually shows the difference between all of these different main boards and what I tried to do in this table was to come up with all of the major differences that I cared about which is probably a lot of the major differences that you're going to care about so in this tab you'll notice I've got everything from the processor that's on the board the what type of processors that is the frequency or the operational speed of that processor I'm going to have the flash size of the processor then I'm going to include whether they're on board steppers or add-on steppers and then down below that you're just going to see a list of different features that each of these boards have everything from whether they have dual Z on board or whether how many fans they've got that kind of thing so starting out with the stock or silent crowding board you'll see that we have an 80 mega 2560 8-bit processor that runs at 16 megahertz as a 256 kilobyte flash on board as on board steppers either the for a 4988 if you're running the stock board or 5 TMC 2208 if you're running the silent board now those 2208 on that board those are going to be in standalone mode you cannot configure them via the firmware but they are in silent mode and as I've shown you on my printer they work rather well you should be familiar with most of the functionality of this board this is kind of going to be our baseline because almost all of these features on this board are being used by this printer so this is kind of the minimal configuration we'll need with either of these boards now good to know up front both of these boards do have the minimum features we need at least and we'll have no problem adapting the wiring to these new boards now moving on to the big tree tech SK our mini III version 2.0 this board is our first 32-bit board it is a cortex m3 core that runs at 72 megahertz now the flash is really interesting on this board because by default it is a 256 kilobyte flash well that's kind of small for what we're doing and what people have figured out is that they're technically 512 kilobytes flash on the board but technically you're only supposed to use 256 kilobytes now I have heard of no one having any problems trying to use the full 512 kilobytes I don't know if you are going to have problems you'll see in my configuration in order to get enough functionality into the board that I wanted I did have to use that 512 kilobytes so I understand that this is confusing is that a 256 kilobyte or 512 kilobytes part well the answer is kind of yes it is a 512 kilobytes that part has then been downgraded to 256 kilobytes because there was a problem in half of that memory or whether it was just Bend into a lower part just so that they would have a lower-cost part it's really hard to say and it honestly maybe up to the board you have so as far as configuration go if you find yourself having some weird flash issues or some weird issues in your printer and you have enabled that 512 kilobytes default you may have to go down to 256 kilobytes in order to resolve those issues that's going to have to make you cut out features unfortunately and my configuration is going to be that 512 kilobytes so that I can leave everything turned on for now so why did I go with the V 1.2 version of this board well that one's pretty easy so the the 1.2 version of this board does not have dual z steppers so it means you have to use a breakout splitter and worry about finding someplace in the chassis to put that not only that but this board actually has a few more features that the 1.2 doesn't have so what I'd recommend go with the 2.0 particularly if you can get your hands on it it's going to be a better board because it's better designed for this printer and you're going to get some new features out of it and the cost differences minimum we're talking like $7 from what I saw so as far as the other features are concerned it has the dual onboard Z as I mentioned it has onboard TMC 22:09 chips which is the latest and greatest everybody's looking for those TMC 2200 9s do have soft end stops which we will not be using because this printer has terrific clicky switch in stop so we don't need those soft end stops on this printer so it does have filament run-out detection on board so we won't have any problems with that it also has neopixel support which I can talk about in a future video and that's going to be about it the other thing you'll want to note on this board is that there is only one expansion port for the character displays so a standard 2 port character display will not work on this board and you will have to have what's called a CR 10 style display or one of these big tree tech TFT displays which is what I'm going to be using the other two big differences between the V 1.2 to the V 2.0 is that the V 1.2 has one controllable fan and one always-on fan whereas the V 2.0 has two controllable fans now I'm going to show you that in a bit but that second controllable fan we can do in firmware is set that as a controller fan that only cuts on when we're printing to cut down that idle noise of the printer the other big difference between the V 1.2 and 2.0 is that on the 2.0 we have what's called a dedicated EEPROM now that EEPROM is where your printer is going to store its settings as opposed to on the 1.2 and be honest even on the v1 point for turbo it's going to actually have to take part of your flash memory to store your EEPROM settings and well number one we've already talked we don't like to use part of our flash for that but particularly on a reduced flash memory board like the e3 we really don't want to take any extra flash that we have to for our corruption issues whatever the case may be that dedicated EEPROM is a nice feature so moving on to the SK RV 1.4 and 1.4 turbo now let's get this out of the way first the only difference from the 1.4 to the 1.4 turbo is the clock speed they have different processors on them one isn't LPC 1768 one is an LPC 1769 they have essentially the same process they're just running at different frequencies so we have a hundred megahertz versus 120 megahertz whether this makes a big difference in performance I doubt it but from what I could tell I think that 1.4 standard is even already being phased out because of that because when I was doing pricing search as you'll see at the bottom of this table they were essentially the same price so I think that 1.4 is going away the 1.4 turbo is probably here to stay and it's only even if you had to find it you know early on it was only a couple of dollars more I don't know why you just wouldn't go ahead and pay the money get a faster bore it a little bit more future-proofing just kind of like if you're buying a faster processor for your PC now as you probably already know or maybe you don't the 1.4 turbo is a big step up in terms of features over the III mini now whether these features matter to you is going to be very much dependent on what your goals are for your printer are you happy with where it is today do you want to do future expansion that kind of thing so looking at the table first of all we see that the v1 point four board is a board that does not come with the drivers on board the drivers aren't and you get these little step or stick add-ons that you're going to just pop in to the board itself and those can be changed out in the future in case there's any advancements in stepper driver technology that you're going to want to bring into your printer now in terms of a lot of the other features notice that does have an extra driver on board now you can use that driver to either drive your Z screw separately or you can install a separate extruder on your printer in the future now from my configuration I am going to continue to drive both of these these screws off of one driver I've had zero issues on any printer ever driving two Z's off of one driver before I'm going to keep doing it that way and I'll tell you why I plan on doing another mod to this to add that secondary extruder now so that what that means to you is that if you download my firmware my firmware is going to just have both of those on that one Z stepper so if you also only want to buy four stepper sticks you can just do that if you're not going to be using that second extruder so looking at the other features as compared to the Mini III you'll notice that it has three always-on fans on this board which is terrific because that's going to give you a lot more expansion if you want more cooling has the same number of n stops because as the same number of axes it has a filament run-out detection for both easy row and E one does not have a dedicated EEPROM like I mentioned but this board does have a actual 512 kilobytes of memory so you shouldn't have any problem using that flash memory for some of your EEPROM you've got you'll have plenty of space other than that it has some more expansion it has plenty of support for any type of display you want to put on here I forgot to mention earlier that this display from big tree tech this is the TFT 3.5 V 3.0 and this is going to utilize both of these outputs on your board or the single output on your III but it also has the touchscreen support which is going to use an additional wire that's going to connect to another port on these boards so it has both modes both touchscreen and text mode so you're going to use both of those connectors so that about does it for features let's spin a minute and talk about the total cost of upgrading to any of these options now first of all the silent board from Cree ality I did an entire video covering that board up here and that is a drop-in replacement on this printer it uses the existing display uses all the existing wiring and it just it's a plug-and-play solution so total cost of ownership there's gonna be sixty-five dollars for an upgrade you're not gonna have to do anything else just drop it in no cutting every case anything like that I can say that the quality of that board is very good the smoothness of those 22:08 steppers it really does show up in your prints and so I can't say enough good things about that one it's been carrying me for quite some time now the next option of course is the mini board the mini also has the steppers on board so there won't be any step sticks or anything like that you have to buy but it is going to need a new display you're going to have a couple of options you're gonna have what's called a CR 10 display it's not this one but it looks a lot like this it is a one wire display similar to what the CR 10 uses you can buy that for about twenty three dollars I've found and then the board itself is going to be about forty six dollars according to the prices I found on Amazon so what are we talking we're talking about sixty nine dollars or so for this solution now what's great about this board it is a also a drop-in replacement as far as not needing to cut not needing to print any adapters or anything like that it drops in it fits into the printer using the existing holes that are already there your USB and your SD card come out where they have been on your other board so take that into consideration it's an easier install again it's about 69 dollars which is about you know three or four dollars more unless you want to go with the nicer display from big tree tech this is a $36 so that's gonna be another $13 putting you in the neighborhood of about 83 dollars or so I think is what we're talking about if you go with that solution so the last option is going to be the strv 1.4 this is going to be the most expensive option now if you're going to go with this one you can buy it with the steppers they come separate as these little stopper sticks as I shown here but they are at an add-on and from Amazon and I'm gonna include this link down below I like the 22:08 there's no feature on the 22:09 that you need on this printer and so save yourself a little bit of money go with 420 208 or 520 208 if you think you need that extra step or driver but for a comparably decked out board it's going to be fifty two dollars that includes your 2208 stepper drivers I will include the link as I mentioned and just like with the mini board you are going to need another display but you have a couple of different options number one you have this twelve eight six four display which is the two-wire display these are cheap displays so if you're looking for something like this these are about $17 displays nothing to that so if you go with the cheap display option you're going to be at about $79 so about $10 more than the other solution and if you go with again the big tree tech board that's going to be a $36 display so we are once again going to be adding about an extra $20 on top of that so I think we're getting closer to the hundred dollar range but again that's kind of what we're looking at here kind of gradually stepping up you can go with the stock option which is gonna be your cheapest and easiest you can go with the mini option which is kind of your middle-of-the-road it's got not quite as much performance as this board but it is a easier drop-in solution than the high-end board and then you have your high-end board which is going to take a little bit more work to install but will give you a little bit more expansion and a little bit more performance so kind of what you're used to in technology you pay a little bit more you do a little bit more work you get a bit more out of it so it seems like my mental math got off a little bit in that last section so I wanted to film a small correction here but as you can see from the board if you take the mini III which has four 22:09 s and you compare that to it s KR v 1.4 with only four 22:08 the prices are almost exactly the same depending on which display you choose so I mean from a cost perspective this means that you can pretty much go with either board depending on whether you need that additional expansion whether you're going to be adding that fifth stepper for either a dual Z or for an extra extruder or whether you need some of the expansion ports that the V one point four offers so I just wanted to film the small correction I think everything else I said is pretty accurate so let's keep going with the rest of the video so I think I've about covered this as much as I can this was the intro let's get to work I'm going to start with the mini e3 first we're gonna do the upgrade right here I want to walk you through that process I have the board schematic then I'm going to show you how I figured out how to transfer those stock wires over to the new board let's get going and that's where we're going to pick up next time so in this video I hope I covered everything that you need to know about the similarities and differences between these boards when it comes time to select one of them for your 3d printer on the next video as I mentioned I'm going to cover the installation of the mini iii-v 2.0 followed by the installation of the V 1.4 turbo then we'll do a comparison to see how all of these boards perform when looking at their test prints so I hope you stay tuned through all of those videos I think that the information I'm going to share in those will not only help you understand these boards but boards in the future so again thanks for watching this video if you haven't already hit the like button go ahead and subscribe if you haven't done that and if you want to support this channel I have the usual links to my PayPal and as well as becoming a patreon member hey I'm about to hit my first big patreon goal if you want to join up I'm going to be trying to do some live streams exclude so for patreon members we're even gonna try something like a zoom meeting or something so that I can get your feedback and we can sort of talk as a group with just the patreon supporter so again thanks for joining me here thanks for supporting this channel with your views or with your patronage and I will see you next time as we continue this journey to upgrade the Ender 5 plus printer with some new 32-bit boards thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Kersey Fabrications

Views: 22,788

Keywords: bigtreetech skr mini e3, bigtreetech skr mini e3 v2.0, bigtreetech skr v1.4, bigtreetech skr v1.4 mainboard, bigtreetech skr v1.4 turbo, creality ender 5 plus, creality silent board, ender 5 plus, ender 5 plus 3d printer, ender 5 plus silent board, ender 5 plus skr 1.4, ender 5 plus skr 1.4 turbo firmware, ender 5 plus skr board, ender 5 plus skr mini, ender 5 plus skr mini e3, ender 5 plus upgrades, kersey fabrications, skr1.4 turbo

Id: lKY5ym6u17k

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020