Ender 5 Plus Bed Leveling: Custom Firmware Update

now a few weeks ago Crowley finally released the source code for the ender five-plus now this is something that many of us had been waiting for for some time so that we could make a few minor tweaks to the firmware so that the printer worked a little bit more like it was supposed to so in this video I'm gonna show you the minor modifications that I'm making of that firmware and I'm gonna make those binaries and source code available to you so that you can update this printer to fix a few nagging issues and I'm going to talk about it right here today on Kersey fabrications let's go jumping right into this I want to explain to you what my methodology for this was what this firmware is meant to do and what it's not meant to do so first of all this source code release from Crotty was for their default mainboard or for their silent board of the Inder five-plus and that's because they both use the same firmware so what did I want to do with this well first of all it's important to keep the functionality of the existing printer to minimize the testing time and to hopefully provide just a few fixes without any major changes to the printer now this is obviously targeted at those that are happy with the default mainboard or with the silent board they don't want to make a lot of hardware changes and in particular don't even necessarily want to have to learn or worry about compiling their own Marlin firmware so in this release what I was going for was one primary fix and that primary fix was fixing the auto bed leveling which did not account for the distance between the BL touch and the printhead and because of that you don't always end up with a bed leveling mesh that prints exactly the way it's supposed to now I wanted one other major fix in here and that was the bed cooling down when it had a filament run out but unfortunately I did find out that that function is part of the display and so this from where release did not solve that problem for me now beyond the mesh fix I was able to add two other features to this so first of all I was also able to add a probe accuracy test which is an m48 command I'll show you that in a few minutes one that allows you to do is test the accuracy of your BL touch to make sure that it's working correctly the other feature that I added was the linear advance function in Marlin now I'm not going to cover how linear advance works or even what it does in this video but I want you to know it's in there and I will provide the links to learning about linear events you'll find them in the description that will take you to Marlins page and maybe even to another video from another youtuber that will be able to help get you started with linear advance so this will be a minor patch really and so next up let's go ahead and take a look at the printer we'll take a look at how you tell which firmware that you're already running and then I will run through real quick how you do the firmware upgrade and most importantly where you're going to get my new firmware from but before we go any further I wanted to warn you that flashing the firmware on your 3d printer could potentially leave you with a printer that doesn't boot correctly and has to be recovered now obviously me in this channel can hold no liability for anything like that that happens and I'm going to give you all the best information I can to help avoid that but if that happens the responsibility is on you to figure out how to recover it and if you're okay with that let's move forward so here's the display on the Ender 5 plus to find out which version of firmware you're currently running just go to the settings menu and hit printer info as you can see this is the current version of firmware that Crowley has released its version 1.7 T dot one BL now when we go to upgrade this you're gonna see this version change because it's been changed in the firmware itself so let's take a look at what we're trying to fix here by fixing the Z offset so I'm going to go to the leveling menu on the printer and it's going to auto home and obviously it goes to the maximum x extent nots going to go to the maximum Y extent and then as it goes to the center notice what's entered now the probe here is measuring how far we're off the bed but our nozzles what's actually in the center so even though the printer believes that it's measuring the center of the bed it's actually not it's measuring the center offset by this far so that's not correct a correct version of bed leveling will put this where the head is and then internally know that there is a difference here in the X and y direction so this is what we need to fix by changing out the firmware this x and y is not something that is user settle in version one one six of Marlin firmware now before we go any further we're going to need to hook our end or five Plus up to our 3d printer so I've got a mini USB connector on this end I want to hook up to the printer now you can obviously use the one that came with your printer I like this one because it's longer and then I can hook up the other end to our PC so that we can talk to our printer now this is going to allow us to get our settings and will allow us to actually flash that firmware so now let's head over to the computer to show you how it's done okay so before we go any further was actually flashing the firmware let's start off with our pronterface which I have discussed in another video and show you how we can save our settings so I'm going to load up pronterface here now you should only have the drop down ports for hopefully the printer that you have connected unless you have other comm port devices on here so mines come for want to select the baud rate of one one five two hundred I'm going to hit connect now the first thing you'll notice is it dumped out all of our settings of our printer directly to the console and this is what we need to save off in case we need any of these settings later now my recommendation is just open up a copy of notepad or your favorite text editor and then we're just going to cut and paste everything from I don't know you can start with the marlin line all the way down to the bottom control C control V and then you can save this file now in this file let's look at what may be important notice that I've gone here and done some tweeting to my printer so this m92 command for example has my steps per unit so these are slight adjustments to my steps per millimeter on my printer which takes me to seventy nine point four eight and my calibrated extruder which on my machine is ninety nine point five two I also have the very much important Z Pro offset which on my printer is negative two point one obviously this is going to be different on your machine depending on how your hot end is put together and what modifications you've made but save all this off in case when we update it we need to reapply these settings now when we're done with that we can simply shutdown on our face because we're done with that now let's talk about where we can get the new firmware changes that I've made thorry what I want to do is go into our web browser you can get to all of my source code that I published publicly on the github comm slash Kersey fabrications with a capital K capital F and right here we have our Marlin v5p for under five plus of course I click here now you can see that I have three hex files here as well as all of the Marlins source in this directory these hex files represent this being the last release that Crowley release which is the 1.71 BL release and then I have two versions of my firmware that are available both the 1.71 okay f KF for Kersey fabrications and then I also have another one which is the same version number but I've called it h m g3 and that is for the Hiromi gen 3 and that's because the offsets that you need for the stock hot n and for the hero medium 3 hot in are different and so if you're running a Hiromi gen 3 you're gonna download this hex file if you're running the stock pot end without any modifications you're gonna need this file now what I can do at this point is I can clone the entire repo or just download a zip of this repo right here and when that comes up I will just download it to my downloads directory and click Save and there we have that entire treat downloaded to our computer now if you don't want to go to the trouble of actually downloading the entire tree including all of the source code I will also include links in the description that will take you directly to these hex files located on my Google Drive that might save you a little bit of time so after I've downloaded that zip file then I'm of course going to need to unzip that if that's the route I took I'm gonna say show in folder that's gonna have my downloads I've downloaded this twice as you can see but I'm just gonna go ahead and unzip this right here I want to say extract I'm going to call it whatever directory I want then I'm going to need to load up Cree allottee slicer to actually do the firmware flashing now I found on Windows 10 I actually have to run this as administrator to get the proper access to do this so I'm going to say run as administrator say yes and now to be sure that my Crowley slicer is actually talking to the right comport I'm going to go to machine settings right here I have the serial port it did default to comp 4 you could also use auto I like to be very specific to make sure it does what it's supposed to and so I say calm 4 make sure 11 5 200 is the baud rate and I'm gonna say okay at that point I can go machine install custom firmware and then I can pick whichever new hex file is correct for my printer so again if I'm running the default hotting configuration I'm gonna choose just the 70 1.0 AF if I'm running the hero medium 3 like I am on my printer I'm going to run the 70 1.0 KF h mg 3 dot hex and I'm gonna say open at this point it's gonna warn us that this can only be used for 80 mega 2560 baseboard which this one is and I would say ok at that point is going to connect and it's going to begin uploading the firmware this should only take a minute and you're gonna want to make sure that this bar makes it all the way down to the end before you move forward so as you can see it says done it says that it installed this hex file correctly we're gonna say ok now once we flash our firmware we can use these settings that we saved off before to make sure that the settings and the new firmware are still correct so let's open up pronterface that pops up just as before and let's go connect here we go these are the settings like it printed out before now I'll notice if we compare our text file - what pronterface is showing us we can see things like our m92 which is our steps per unit are still correct and the most important here the Z probe offset is also still correct now let's just say for the sake of demonstration that our m 851 had been reset for some reason to correct that all we need to do is go to our text file we can copy it paste it into pronterface and hit enter now that's going to reset that offset to what it should be then we can simply type in 500 - save that settings back and that setting has been corrected now if you see any other settings that are wrong that you would like to tweak you can do that while you're in here just make sure you hit M 500 to save them back so just as we did before let's take a look at the settings printer info and there we go as you can see we're running our new Kiersey fabrications based software which is 1.71 dot o KF h mg 3 again for the hiromi gen 3 obviously if you are running the stock you won't have that h mg 3 on the end so let's go up top let's take a look at our homing sequence see if we get that offset as we were expecting so this is where we left it last time let's go to the leveling screen see what it looks like leveling its going to home and if all goes to plan now the probe will be in the center of the bed not the hot end and that's what we're getting here the probe is now the center and the software knows that the hot end is an offset now we can go through our bed leveling sequence and verify this even further by making sure that when the probe comes to either side of the bed it should be equidistant from each side of the bed and look correct in terms of a square mesh equally divided so let's do that now I'm going to hit the measuring button so notice we are about this far from this side a couple of inches now as we go to this side again the probe is a couple of inches from this side as well now what this does is it's going to make sure that the bed is leveled according to where the hot end is going to be and that the mesh that it's generating should be correct for where we're actually printing not you know 50 millimeters from where we're printing now notice when this goes to the center of the bed at this point the nozzle is at the center of the bed and not the probe so as I mentioned earlier in the video I want to show you what the m48 probe accuracy test is and how to use it so this test is designed to check the accuracy of your bed probe so in this case it's our BL touch and this is the marlin page that describes some of the options available for this test so how do you use that I'm going to show you step-by-step let's go back into pronterface go and connect to the printer and once we're connected this is a pretty easy test to run so all we have to do is first home the printer with the g28 command once the printer is home we're going to type m48 and then give it a number of times we want it to probe so we'll go with 10 so P 10 and then if we pass it a V 2 this is the verbosity level and a v2 means that we'll get a little bit more information while it's doing the protein so does a first probe just to get a feel for where the bed is then the next probe will be the actual first test and there we go we get a 1 of 10 and our offset is negative 0.001 so the 10 probes are done it's showing the mean is this number so that's our average which is three point five thousandths three and a half thousands of a millimeter our men was five thousandths our max was 1,000 and our range was point zero zero four thousand so the standard deviation on this test is about one thousandth of a millimeter that's extremely accurate for bed throw so we can be confident moving forward that our bed probe results are going to be accurate now I hope this process was really easy and you're able to get your printer flash to this new version of software I also hope that it fixes your bed leveling issues you may have been having with your indoor five plus now if you want to know more about the source code changes that I made to this printer check in the description it's only a few lines of code I changed I'll leave the information there keep in mind that this is an old version of Marlin and you'll have to use the Arduino IDE to edit this source code because it doesn't have the necessary files to use something like vs code easily now if you want to go even deeper into this and make even further changes into this firmware I'm going to leave you with two projects that you can use as an alternative to what I provided first of all there's a project from insanity automation in conjunction with tiny machines 3d now in that firmware they have new software new firmware they also have new software for the touchscreen that adds a bunch of features now this one obviously it's more in depth it's more configuration than what I did here but if you want to follow the link that I'm going to put right here as well in the description you can walk through that and make further changes to this printer that may even fix more issues as well as give you a newer version of Marlin the other alternative if you're willing to switch out the display on the printer for a more standard character based display you can go check out th 3d and do their mod and with their mod you're going to get a new display and then put new firmware on the board to use that display I'll include a link down in the description below for that now those are two more advanced options for people that are willing to do a little bit more tinkering with the hardware or the firmware now with all that being said I still have one big mod for you on this printer I'm going to be switching out the main boards I'm going to test out two options from Big Tree tech I'm going to have the SKR 1.4 turbo I'm also going to have the SK our mini e3 we're gonna look at both of those main boards check out the pros and cons and then see how they work in the end or five-plus along with that we're going to be swapping out the display for one of their options it's going to give you both a character type display as well as a touchscreen so I have that coming right around the corner so if you've enjoyed this content as usual you can show your appreciation by hitting the like button obviously if you're new here go ahead and subscribe and get notifications with the little bell icon and if you want to help contribute to the channel the usual patreon option is by far the easiest choice so I appreciate it guys thanks for joining me here again on Kersey fabrications see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Kersey Fabrications

Views: 46,238

Keywords: 3d printer, auto bed leveling, creality ender 5, creality ender 5 3d printer, ender 5 plus, ender 5 plus 3d printer, ender 5 plus bed leveling, ender 5 plus bltouch, ender 5 plus bltouch blinking red, ender 5 plus bltouch firmware, ender 5 plus bltouch fix, ender 5 plus bltouch not working, ender 5 plus firmware update, ender 5 plus setup, ender 5 plus silent board, ender 5 plus upgrades, kersey fabrications

Id: 9pDoxf13_wg

Length: 19min 35sec (1175 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020