Creality Silent Board vs. BTT SKR Mini E3 V2.0 vs. BTT SKR V1.4 Turbo (E5P Upgrade Part 5)

so welcome to the final part in my series where i've been covering the upgrades to two different big tree tech motherboards the mini e3 version 2.0 and the skrv 1.4 turbo in this series so far i've covered the breakdown and setup of the printer in order to prepare for the new boards i've covered the install of the new display the tft 35 version 3.0 and then i covered the installation of each of the main boards in this printer now it's time to sort of sum all of this up give you my impressions of each of the boards do one final pro and con comparison and take a look at all these test prints i have comparing them to the creality silent board which i previously had installed in this printer that's what i'm doing in this video right here today on curzy fabrications let's go [Music] so let's begin with where i started this video series and that's taking a look at the differences between the three options that i've tested so far so first of all we have the creality silent board it is an 18 mega 2560 baseboard and it is an 8 bit processor running at 16 megahertz now the two big tree tech options are the skr mini e3 version 2.0 which runs an st micro stm32f so again it's a 32-bit processor running at 72 megahertz and then we have the big treetech skrv 1.4 turbo which is an nxp based processor which is an lpc 1769 which is a 32-bit processor also running at 120 megahertz now these two 32-bit processors are made by different manufacturers and may perform differently looking at the flash on all of these boards the creality silent board is a 256k flash the mini e3 is a 256k flash that can be modified into a 512k flash if you're unfamiliar with that process take a look at that original video where i go into details there and the skrv 1.4 turbo is an actual 512k flash giving it the advantage if you need that extra flash space next looking at the stepper options the crowley silent board has five tmc 2208 steppers that are in standalone mode so if you need to mess with anything like the voltage settings you're going to have to do that manually using the potentiometers on board the skr mini e3 is going to have four tmc 2209s on board but those are going to be software configurable through uart and on the skr v 1.4 turbo it has five open slots for stepper sticks that you can use whichever type you like you can use five tmc 2208 five tmc 2209s or choose different ones depending on which access you're controlling so you have a lot of flexibility there when it comes to my testing i am going to have tmc 2208s in four of those slots because i doubled up on the z-axis just like my other boards were doing now as for the features overall on these boards i tested all three of them in my ender five plus which already actually has a couple of nice features that allowed me to test some of the options available so it does have a filament run out detection and it does have a bl touch so i tested that on all three of these boards works without any problems but when it comes to upgradeability that's where the differences in these boards really starts to come out on the crowley silent board the only real upgrade option you have is an unused stepper motor driver that could be used either for a second extruder or to separate your two z motors out onto their own stepper motor driver the processor though as i've shown in my marlin upgrade videos isn't going to leave you a lot of room for adding a lot of features to your firmware because it's already maxed out on the skr mini e3 version 2.0 there's not really any extra ports there's not an extra stepper motor driver the only real open port that you have for expandability is going to be for neopixel lighting if you want to add additional lighting to your printer as far as the performance goes given that it's a 32-bit board you should still have plenty of room to add additional features to marlin without bogging down that processor too much on the skrv 1.4 turbo you're going to have a lot of expandability because it's a bigger board with a lot more ports available on it it's got an extra stepper it has extra fan headers it has the neopixel header just like the mini e3 and then it has i squared c and spy to expand the peripherals that it supports it has a wi-fi header if you want to do on-board wi-fi on the board and again just like the mini e3 it's a 32-bit processor and should have plenty of expandability in terms of processor overhead to add additional features and since i've already mentioned it here a couple of times i'll go ahead and bring up what other people have mentioned in the comments to my video that the reason you might want to put each of these z steppers on separate drivers is because marlin firmware actually does support something called g34 and with that feature what you can do is you can level the left and right sides of the beds using the separate motors using the bl touch so that's a nice feature if you find that your bed is not staying level on the left and right if you're moving your printer a lot or if you just want to add one more thing automated to your printer that's something that i may cover in a future video to better explain exactly how that's used i will include a link in the description to an article or at least to the marlin page that explains what g34 does now it's time to look at the test prints from each of these boards to see if we see any difference in the actual print quality from board to board if you've watched any of my previous marlin 2.0 videos you're going to be familiar with the two test prints i have here on the table i've got the traditional benchy test which is a terrific test when you want to look at a known sample and this one covers overhangs it covers layer consistency it covers bridging there's a lot of information you can still get from a benchy and the other test i have here is this batman bust from david osman this is available on my mini factory and i will have a link to it in the description as well and i've used this test to test the performance of the main boards because what you find is that all of these curves when sliced by the slicer turn into a lot of very very small segments there's a lot of g-code to process here and we can really see the performance of the processor depending on how it was able to process these g-codes at higher speeds so i've got benchmarks here at two different speeds i have 50 millimeter per second speeds which is for me the standard print speed 50 or 60 millimeters per second and i have a high speed print which is a hundred millimeters per second that's going to test how the printer processes g code and just overall how is the motion on these boards at higher speeds so first of all looking at the benches i'm going to put those up here in the screen for you benchy at 50 millimeters per second for all three boards for the silent board the big tree tech mini e3 as well as the skr v 1.4 turbo for me all three of these were virtually identical you might find one thing on one print one thing on another print but just looking at them overall as a test print they were virtually identical to me looking at the batman test prints at 50 millimeters per second again virtually identical prints the only real thing to note was that on the skr v 1.4 print there was one line of filament that seemed off but again i don't know what could have caused that it's just one line so i'm not going to take that as indicative to the whole board i've done other test prints with this board at this point and i have not seen such missed lines so i think this was kind of a one-off so let's look at the benchy at 100 milligrams per second again just like we saw on the benchy at 50 millimeters per second all three of these again virtually identical prints keep in mind this benchy is the standard size benchy and that means that it doesn't have a lot of room to really get going on speed the difference in speed from a 50 millimeter to a 100 millimeter per second print is only about 20 minutes so we're not talking a large percentage increase in the print time and again all three of these boards were able to keep up printing a benchy at that speed producing similar results so this is really the print that's going to show any differences in the board because the hundred millimeter per second batman print is the one that really shows what the board can process or not if you compare first of all the stock board the silent board running at 100 millimeters per second and the mini e3 running at 100 millimeters per second you'll see a massive difference in quality on the back of these capes and you also see that same difference in quality on the front of the print in the cape in the stomach area a little bit again really a big difference in print quality because of the amount of stuttering and pausing the printer itself has to do to keep up with that amount of g-code but you can see that there's a lot of overhead still available on the mini e3 which you definitely do not have on that stock 8-bit board now comparing the mini e3 to the skr v 1.4 turbo 100 millimeters per second this is the one that really shocked me because the v 1.4 turbo is running quite a bit faster in terms of clock speed and yet the mini e3 quality is better at a hundred millimeter second and noticeably better not just a little better so that really shocked me that you could get that much better quality out of the slower processing core so i did look into these two processors to try to figure out what may be causing the difference in this performance i only found a couple of things that possibly could account for it so first of all keep in mind these are by two different manufacturers they are by st micro in nxp and the st micro core which is the one in the mini e3 has a little bit more cash near the processor that may help in its performance and the st micro processor support package for the st micro is much more mature than the one provided by nxp for arduino so that also could be it could just be a less mature stack of code that's available for the nsp than for the st micro again i just went looking i was trying to find out what could be possibly causing this difference that was all i could find but it does appear that the e3 is slightly faster and i'm able to back this up if you remember from the marlin 2.0 videos we can also take a look at the print time for each of these to see how fast they completed so if we look at the silent board this completed in three hours and 55 minutes the mini e3 completed in three hours and 46 minutes and the skrv 1.4 turbo 3 hours and 47 minutes now that's only one minute slower than our mini e3 but that still says the mini e3 did finish faster it could very well change the way that it printed during the print that is not accountable in speed but as you can see the quality and the print time do match so from a performance perspective i have to say the mini e3 is the faster of the three boards i know no one was expecting that i wasn't expecting that but there we have it so let's finish this video off and this whole series off with my final recommendations between the three boards now the creality silent board is for those that do not want to mess with firmware and do not want to mess with modifying the case and is happy with the performance that they're getting out of their ender five plus but just want to quiet it down and that's what crowley is selling it for so if you're one of those people you're like the printer's too noisy i want to increase the quality of my prints a little bit by putting better drivers on there but i really am not a firmware guy i don't want to deal with the hassles then get the creality silent board it's an inexpensive choice when you're looking at the overall cost of the mod and i still recommend it for those people now the skr mini e3 version 2.0 this is the perfect choice for those that don't want to modify their case wants top-notch performance but doesn't really have any need to expand the features of the printer and as i showed again you're going to get the performance you're going to get your new steppers which are going to be programmable through your firmware and if you pair that with the new display you've really given yourself a power upgrade that doesn't require a lot of modification to the printer now i hope that the firmware that i provided will work for all of those people as well and the firmware aspect of that will be very little hassle in terms of upgrading to that board now the skr v 1.4 turbo still a very fast 32-bit board doesn't seem to be faster than the e3 but still a top-notch in terms of performance now this board is going to be for people that want some additional expandability who think that they need that extra stepper driver for either a second extruder if they want to pair those two steppers off to their z access to use that g34 feature that's going to be for you if you want that i squared c header if you want to make sure that your flash is solid you need that full 512k that's going to be for you the board offers a lot more expansion as i showed and so this is for the modders that are going to continue to play now what if you want the speed and performance of the mini e3 as we showed it is a little bit faster but you want the expandability of the skr v 1.4 turbo well big tree tech has you covered with that one too with the skr pro v 1.2 which was just released that is a much faster processor that is an st microprocessor running at 168 megahertz that's over twice the speed of the mini e3 and a lot more expandability than even what the v 1.4 turbo has so keep that in mind if neither of these boards really do everything you want there is still higher grade boards they even have the gtr which is for people that need even more expandability people looking at interchangeable print heads things like that but i do like the skr pro v 1.2 i think you should look into that one if neither of these boards seem like the perfect fit and you'd like to kind of combine them into one massive board now obviously that board's even bigger than the skr v 1.4 turbo and so you're going to definitely have to modify your case some more and possibly even make some room in your chassis if you haven't already pulled your power supply out the back so i hope that narrows it down i hope that explains what the offerings are who they are for and really makes this whole upgrade path easier to understand if this still has not made a whole lot of sense to you and you're still on the fence please leave me a question down in the comments below and i will do my very best to answer your questions to give you a little bit more advice if there's anything i've missed in these videos that you've thought of that you would like to tell your fellow modders please leave that information in the comments below everyone check out the comments section there's always lots of information from the community leaving more ideas asking a lot more questions so spend some time in the comment section just checking out what other people have to say now if you found this video or this entire video series educational or entertaining please leave this video a like please share the videos in this series i'm going to have a link to the full playlist i'll pop that up here i'll put that in the description you can share that playlist with others when they start having questions about how to perform this mod should i go with this board or that board i hope i've covered all of that here again leave a like please subscribe to this channel if you haven't done that already click the little bell if you'd like to be notified when i post future videos again if you want to help support this channel if you like the content i'm producing here if you find value in it please check the description for my paypal links for my patreon links if you want to be a continuing supporter all of that really helps out the channel and really helps me produce more content and again i really appreciate you just watching these videos leaving your comments below again hey i'm chris this has been kersey fabrications i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Kersey Fabrications

Views: 30,805

Keywords: big tree tech skr, bigtreetech, bigtreetech skr mini e3 v2.0, bigtreetech skr v1.4, bigtreetech skr v1.4 marlin, bigtreetech skr v1.4 turbo ender 5, bigtreetech skr v1.4 turbo marlin, bigtreetech v1.4, btt skr 1.4, btt skr v1.4 turbo, btt skr v1.4 turbo firmware, creality ender 5 plus, creality silent board, ender 5 plus, ender 5 plus skr 1.4, ender 5 plus upgrades, kersey fabrications, skr mini e3, skr mini e3 v2.0, skr v1.4, skr v1.4 turbo

Id: 27_b8liYinU

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020