Ender 5 Plus Silent Board: Installation, Debugging and Testing

so you have an indoor 5 plus 3d printer and at this point you've come to realize it's not the quietest printer in the world well in this video and one more follow up video I'm going to show you several different upgrades for this printer to quiet it down in this video I'm going to show you the simplest option and that's upgrading to the Crowley silent board for the Ender 5 plus so what makes this board different than the one it comes with and how exactly do you go about the upgrade and in the end what will be the results of this upgrade well that's what I'm wondering you right here today on Kersey fabrications let's go so on this channel before I've already covered doing a silent board upgrade on my regular endure 5 3d printer that's important to keep in mind that this main board is not that main board the one in the regular ender 5 is usually labeled 1 1 4 or 1 1 5 it's a much simpler board than the one you'll find in this printer this is usually labeled v 2.2 now where can you find this main board well there's only one place right now that I would trust ordering that from and that is from the Cree ality 3d official comm that is Crowley's official website I'm going to put it up right here and it will be in the description it's the only place that I know that I can guarantee that you're getting official hardware now when you go to that page you'll see that they offer this board in three different flavors they'll offer it for the ender 5 plus the CRX and the CR 10's it's my understanding that all three of them are the same board but if you want it to come pre flash for your printer just like mine did then you'll want to order it for your specific board so what makes this board different than the one that comes with the stock printer well there's only one main difference and that's that it has different stepper drivers on here the chips that actually control the signals to your stepper motors now the ones that it come with are called TMC 22:08 as opposed to the a 4988 that it came with and the difference in noise level that these chips produce is night and day the TMC 2208 drivers are much more advanced they produce a much better signal for these Zephyrs which results in less noise now as I showed in some of the videos on my indoor 5 this also can result in nicer prints and that's gonna be one of the other things I'm looking at in this video so what am I going to be testing so first of all noise level obviously I have a sound meter I want to be looking at I also have an app on my phone that I'm hoping will show kind of the difference in spectrum between the different sounds that you're going to hear with this printer as you may know the sound that these usually produce is pretty high-pitched which is much more annoying than like a low fan Rumble now just to see if we can expect any quality improvements in your prints I'm also going to be printing a couple of test prints I have this skull that I've already printed on the printer I chose this one because it has a lot of smooth curves if there's any improvement in the consistency of the print you're gonna see it on this test prep and I'm also doing a mechanical test so I've got this Raspberry Pi box which I can take a look at the quality of the walls and some of the internal components to see just how consistent we're getting in a mechanical design so without further ado let's go ahead and let me show you how to upgrade this printer now the first thing we're gonna do of course when you start any modification to your electrical system unplug it from the power next up we can disconnect the power supply from the electronics now if you haven't done this power supply mod that I showed you in my other video then you don't have to do this step you can simply make it where you can disconnect the rest of the components you may want to unplug some of these depending on how much room you have to work you're gonna unplug your wiring from your different components but if you've got room to work you may not have to do that now once you have those disconnected we can then move on to removing the box as I mentioned in my power supply video I find that it's much easier to remove the entire box than to try to turn over the whole printer which may cause you more problems by messing up your alignment or you know different parts of the printer obviously if you have any USB devices just connect those as well as pull out any SD cards that may be in your printer this can be flipped over fairly easily we can work from there now for the sake of this video and for the ease of showing you how to do this I have completely disconnected all of the wires from my power supply while I do this you notice they're all back here these are all the wires that you hooked up when you first got your printer I went ahead and disconnected it now whatever you want to do in terms of getting to these components easily that's up to you as you saw just a minute ago I had it just tilted on its side if that works for you just do that it'll save you a little bit of time but make sure you have enough room to work you don't want to get frustrated because your hands get tangled up or because you just can't get to what you need to so I have all of these screws disconnected we're going to now pull out the top and notice this is plugged in right here I'm going to unplug that set that aside now when it comes to replacing this mainboard you're going to have a lot of options and there's not one right way to do this now some of these are already labeled so these have little labels that say X Y Z 1 Z 2 e those sort of things are already labeled so these will be easy to put back now some of these other components though can go in multiple places and they're not labeled so you have some choices you can look at the board figure out where they're supposed to go and then put little tabs on them if you want to or you could take different colored markers and mark the wire so that you can figure out where they're supposed to go you could take pictures however you want to do it again there's really not a wrong way as long as you can keep up with where those wires came from to begin with obviously we're just going to be taking all of the wires from this board hooking them up to this board and getting everything screwed back down so here's how I'm going to do it again if you do it this way please be very careful I'm going to show you what I feel is the best way to get everything hooked up out losing track of where they go again this is my way of doing it choose which way makes the most sense to you first of all I'm going to pull off this one which just comes from the LCD screen then I'm going to go ahead if you notice all these wires come this direction depending on whether you have your power supply here you may have more or less room in here I have lots of room right now I'm going to go ahead and pull the screws out of this board let me mention a little bit about grounding make sure that you're grounded to something make sure you're touching the metal chassis here if you're doing this on carpet that's not particularly a good thing because you could be developing static electricity you're gonna take precautions to try to ground yourself as much as possible hopefully this chassis even disconnected from the wall will provide enough grounding so there are four screws in this board and then it should come free now I'm just gonna pull this board aside now I can take my new board go ahead and get that placed in the correct location and then screw down my new board you know everything is tightened down I'll take this LCD put that right back where it came from let's move that out of the way now what I can do I can take these one at a time and just move them back to the new board not forgetting where anything goes now if you've never removed yours before they could have hot glue on them still if they have hot glue on them still you're gonna have to break that off either with some needle nose pliers or just by wiggling it you're probably going to be able to get those off just like that and then if you want to you can go and pull off that hot glue or leave it on whichever one you want I'm going to come back to that one in a minute let's get these low hanging ones down here now this one notice there are four sets of pins here it goes on the third counting this way one two three and then there's just one set on the other side it's going to go right there then I start pulling these over it was on the bottom and I'm gonna just gonna take these together losing track of where they go another thing I could do at this point to make this easier on myself is there is still a tie wrap here which is keeping this a little bit too tight to work with I can very carefully cut that tie wrap off now these things will not be so tight being held together this fan gonna go to the bottom one and I'm gonna just go ahead and pull these off because these are well labeled like I mentioned and that will get them out of my way and I may not be doing these wires in the most efficient order but do whatever makes sense to you my fan goes here now the cooling fan for the components which is on my lid is going to go to this one right here next to this one that I just plugged in I'm gonna grab different flathead screwdriver here go ahead and loosen up the turbos that I'm gonna need now what you're looking for and I can't show you this very well but as you're unscrewing these the terminals are dropping down on this far side leaving an opening for you to stick the wires through so if you've never done that before that's what you're looking for as you unscrew these terminals drop down here and then as you tighten them back up they will rise these two don't matter which side they go on they are not polarized in any way I'm going to try to keep them on the same side make sure when you put these back in that you're pinching the wire and not pinching the the sheathing of the wire because if obviously if you pinch the plastic of the wire you're not going to get connectivity and you're gonna wonder why your hot end doesn't heat up and then this one's your bed now this one does matter notice the black one is on this side the red one is on this side and on the board it is labeled minus and plus these do need to be put back on this same side that they come off we go again negative on this side positive on this side and these are arguably the most important wires that you're going to reconnect these are the power wires that go to the main board again polarity very very important here negative on this side positive on this side black and red otherwise you're really going to give yourself a problem and probably blow up the board there you go now with all of these I just give them a gentle tug to make sure that they're seated correctly now I can come in with my motor wires again pull off any plastic excuse me any hot glue that's still on them and then pay attention to these this one's why so it goes here this one should be X so it goes right here then I have E so this is the extruder it goes into ez Rho which is the next one right here excuse me not the next one but the one second from the end then this one z1 and z2 and these don't really matter which ones they go into because these two are both split off of this one driver won't put z2 on the bottom c1 on the top and not really important now if I want I can come in here and we grab some zip ties make sure I have everything hooked back up make sure there's nothing loose that I forgot to put back together and I want to zip tie this back up the way I found it I'm gonna take this fan like I said it goes to the top one here again don't put it in the one in the middle because if you do it will only cut on with your hot end and that's a bad thing now let's button this back up and reinstall it alright so I'm going to plug back in my SD card I'm going to plug back in my USB now of course I don't have to do this right now I'm just doing anything I want to and now for the moment of truth does it cut back on oh you know what it helps if you plug in the power all right so now the powers plug down now does it cut back on I hear the BL touch and did we power up yes we do everything is working like it should be so now next steps let's go up top and get the printer set up alright so with the new board we are back to square one and we need to go through our leveling Z offset everything that we started out with on our brand new printer so I go to the leveling menu just like we did before and this will go through its normal BL touch leveling sequence so you already hear during this level of cycling it's much quieter than old printer we do not hear the movement of the printer obviously I do have another printer going here in the background but you'd hear the motors of this one if it was going absolutely no murder squill and if you're familiar with the way that yours came hopefully it came way off offset so this is not the proper Z offset obviously and we're going to need to adjust it accordingly now make sure you have your hot end and your nozzle heated up for this and then we are going to adjust our nozzle down until we are barely scraping and I'll show you a trick that I have found on this printer that works for me can't promise it'll work for you this is what I found so if you go to right where it's scratching and then go one more where it is really hard to get out I find that that is the proper is the offset for this printer at least that works for me you would think it was one up to where it moves freely but for whatever reason I always find that going one down where it feels too tight is the proper leveling on this printer for me now once you've done that you can go through the four corners leveling first once you get all of that done then we can go through the measure that leveling to get the mesh right now that we're all done here it is time to go through our test prints so I made it through a couple of test prints with the new board in and so I got the first print off and I compared it to my before print the one with the stock board and I wasn't really happy with the side walls I can't really tell you what it is you probably won't even be able to see the camera doesn't want to focus but anyway you probably won't even be able to see the difference it's it's kind of a sheen difference in the sidewalls so something didn't look quite right don't really know what it was really didn't notice anything while this was printing but I wasn't standing nearby the whole time it was going but when it came to do the skull print that I'm doing for a test print that's when I noticed what was going on so with this print number one when it was printing the raft I had lots of clicking in the extruder that was my first thing I really noticed but as he got up a few layers I noticed well the clicking seems to be going maybe it's just a low layer thing but what I notice once I finally got this to print correctly is that the infill is just really garbage which means that that clicking that I first heard and probably what I was seeing on my other print is under extrusion because basically this board since they put a TMC driver on the extruder as well it probably doesn't have enough current to keep that extruder going so unfortunately at this point what I need to do I need to flip the printer over unfortunately I can't just move the box like I did last time because I have to be able to get to it while it's powered up in order to adjust the potentiometers that are on each of those stepper so that's what I'm gonna do next got to flip this over and I'll show you what to do if you have any of your stepper motors that are not driving the steppers correctly particularly if you're getting any skipping or stuttering in those motors alright so I have my printer on its side here again I had to do this so that I could get to the board while it's powered up so what I'm needing to do I need to check how much reference voltage is on each of these drivers that's going to give me a good idea about how much power going to be going to the stepper motors so first of all I've got my multimeter here on 20 volts and DC of course then I'm going to stick my black lead my ground lead to one of the black wires here or on one of these actually it needs to be here let's go and put it here there's my black lead and then I'm going to see the little screws by each one of them they're on the bottom or left side whatever you want to say there's a little screw that is by each one of these drivers and be very careful not to touch anything but the screw you could short something out on this board then touch that so this one's at 0.55 that's extremely low that's my x-axis this one's 0.72 that's gonna be about average what you see on these 0.83 that is my z-axis so they already have that one turned up and then E is back down to 0.73 and honestly the extruder is actually going to need to be one of our highest voltages because that's actually doing more work than almost any of the other steppers here so the Z is good there at Point a 3 because it's driving to steppers I'm going to kind of go off of that reference voltage and actually to be safe I want to take all of them up to that point eight because I just feel a lot bit better for the long term running them at that higher voltage now you don't have to any of these that are running good for you that you don't want to modify you don't need to modify but I'm going to do this as a preventative measure and then later we'll check our steppers make sure nothing's overheating again this one's at 0.55 I'm going to grab a very small screwdriver again make sure you're not touching anything but that screw let's start to the right see if that's the correct way just very very small turns don't get in a hurry if you turn this too much you will you could blow up that driver there so actually we need to go to the left to go up so let's see what we're at now point five eight also keep in mind there are other ways to do this I could have attached some alligator clamps directly to this and measure it as I went didn't have that set up right now so this is what I'm using there's a point seven we're getting close point eight three on the nose you need to go up about that far on that one point eight two we're good there this is the one that was already at point eight three so now we just need to turn up that extruder and we're gonna test this I'm actually not gonna put the cover back on here yet because until I'm sure that this is enough current I'm not actually gonna button this up that's 0.87 0.88 you know what just because I want some extra power there I want to leave that there we're going to check the temperatures of the steppers later make sure we're not burning anything up but I want to leave that at point eight eight for now we're gonna run those test prints again and see how it looks in that Bush yeah so after much testing and a mostly finished skull here that I was working on as a test print I think I've basically come up with the settings that I want to use here I think these are gonna be my final settings for this because I've spent a lot of time trying to figure this out and get the settings just right one thing I've learned if you set the voltage is too high on our X&Y steppers then you get more noise out of them and still if you're not setting this the voltage on this stepper you're definitely going to get skipping still so I'm going to set both of these around the point six maybe a little bit above point six mark I'm gonna leave this I think basically what it came at probably about the one point two I think is what this at and I'm gonna go all the way one point four on our stepper so let's see where we are here so here we are we have a point six one this one we're at point five six I'm gonna take that one up just a little bit Oh point six five I'm okay with that on this one Oh point eight three let's just take that up to a full one I think we'll be fine there there got a point nine nine one that's exactly where we want to be and on this one I am currently at point three two I'm going to take that up a little bit more I'm still getting in just a little bit of skipping one four five you know that's really a little bit higher than I think this is gonna be rated at I don't want to take this too high I don't want to burn up these steppers or I'm gonna need more cooling on them although if I have the choice I'm going to go higher than lower because I was still getting skipping so there's a one three nine I'm going to leave it right there we're gonna try there that's going to be as about as high as I can take this without feeling like I'm gonna burn it up I'm gonna leave it right there I'm gonna turn this back on its side I'm gonna print that skull and box test print we're gonna see how they look here we have the side by side sound comparison of these two boards I was originally going to do this in two segments but decided this was a better way to present this data so here we have on the Left we have the original board the decibel meter showing anywhere from 60 to 65 decibels averaging about 63 on the right we have the silent board averaging probably around 58 59 decibels peaking no more than 60 so we have about a 5 decibel difference which doesn't sound like a lot but when it comes to sound can actually be considerably more now next up I have a app on my phone that will show the spectrum of the two printers so on the left you have the original board and that's showing some peak particularly around the 1,100 Hertz range but even down into the lower frequencies we're kind of seeing a kind of a Messier curve we're on the silent board on the right that 1,100 Hertz has been really flattened out and just in general the curve itself is a lot flatter because mainly we're hearing just the fan now what I'm gonna do right here is you know hearing is believing so first up this is the sound that the original board makes and second up here is the sound that the silent Board makes now the difference in the two Clips obviously is not the fan noise in the background but that high-pitched sound that we get from the motors you don't hear that on the silent board anymore so now that we've heard the difference between the two boards let's see if we can see a difference in the quality of our prints so here we are with our two sets of test prints these scold models were done to check the smoothness and overall layer consistency of the printer and this one being the before and this one being the after the mod I would be really hard-pressed to tell you that there was anything different between these two prints wouldn't have known that there was any change done to the printer there's really no quality difference underneath in terms of the layers once I got those extruder issues sorted out I seem to have pretty much the same printer as before in terms of print quality looking at the mechanical models again same thing any flaw that was there in the model I see in both of them probably a slicer issue if anything and again the layer consistency between the two pretty much identical so while the mod does give us a quieter printer it doesn't seem to buy so much more than that this is purely for peace of mind if you're printing in an environment that you really need it to quiet down the printer so time for my final thoughts so what are my final thoughts on replacing your stock board with a silent board well first of all this mod took me way longer than I expected it to and I think from watching the video the reason for that's pretty obvious I had to go in and I had to tweak and fiddle with the stepper voltages in order to get this printer renting the way I expected it to from my previous experience with the stock board now hopefully my experience in this video will help you not to have to go through all of that if you are having printing issues with the board after you've tested it the way it came from the factory hopefully you can use the voltages I came up with to get a more reliable printing experience on your printer now while we're still talking about that let me mention that occasionally when I'm printing too close to the glass or when I have filament that's particularly harder or needs higher temps I will still get skipping I've had to raise the filament temperature on a couple of rolls to get rid of that skipping at least on the lower or first layers of the print now that's obviously a different experience than I had with the stock board the stock board doesn't ever skip those a 4988 drivers are workhorses and they have lots of power so just take that into consideration so what are you getting for your fifty five to eighty dollars whatever this board ends up costing you well as we saw with the quality test you're getting a quiet print experience so who's this going to be worth that to well obviously if you have this in a work environment if you have this in a home environment that silence is going to be worth a lot because now your printer is no longer being an obtrusive part of your life and it can sit over there and just do its job so I think that that's who it's going to appeal to most if you're looking for a print experience that has more features that maybe has silence but with the strength of the a 4988 or something similar for that extruder driver then you're going to look for something different here and in a few weeks I'm going to have some more options for replacing this now bottom line this is still the easiest way to get a silent setup because all you're doing is a drop in exchange of the board and as we found out then maybe a little bit of tweaking to the voltages to get it to print just right but that's about as easy as it's going to come if you want to keep this stock display on here if you the touchscreen that came with I think this is still gonna be your best option now if you're looking for a board with more features or maybe you are looking to replace your display there are other options from other vendors you can get a board from th through D and as I'm going to show in a few weeks you can also get a board from Big Tree tech companies like that so keep in mind that while this is going to be the simplest and easiest option for some there are more robust options for others as I mentioned before if you are looking to purchase one of these silent boards check out Cree Ali's official website you know there you'll be buying directly from the source you have the option of the correct firmware to be installed and I think you're going to have an overall better experience than if you buy from a third party and of course that link is in my description as always now before you run off I have one more thing I want to show you before you click over to that next video if you were into swag from YouTube channels I've got some I need to give away obviously with all that's going on in the world I've got swag left over that I can't give away like a normally would at the various conventions like Murph and possibly even earth so for my new patreon this month if you subscribe at the $10 a month level or above I'm going to be sending you these new sticker and magnet combo these guys this bumper sticker got a holographic sticker and we have a magnet that I'm currently sporting on these guys as well as my truck they do stick to these metal boxes so if you're interested again if you if you like this kind of thing if you have a use for it please check out my patreon I will of course show icons and logos here and there will be links in the description go join at the $10 a month level again if you only want to join for one month you'll get the stickers you'll get the stuff and then you're good to go so I appreciate all the support I get from you guys I appreciate you watching this video I hope I didn't run too long here again there was way more here than just a drop in and go sort of mod so that's what I showed you again thanks for watching I'm Chris this has been Kiersey fabrications thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Kersey Fabrications

Views: 46,649

Keywords: ender 5 plus silent board, ender 5 plus, ender 5 plus 3d printer, ender 5 plus bed leveling, ender 5 plus upgrades, creality silent board ender 5 plus, ender 5, ender 5 3d printer, ender 5 silent board, ender 5 upgrades, creality ender 5, creality silent board, 3d printer, 3d printing, creality ender 5 plus, main board silent

Id: cAI0H4e6Usg

Length: 33min 7sec (1987 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020