Ender 3 Pro Main Board / Display Upgrade

Tony

Staff member
In the CR Touch thread, I mentioned upgrading my main board and the display. And I did. At the bottom of this thread is the link to the amazon page I purchased from. Now, this is only a "First Look" for these two items, and there will be more updates in the future.

I was a little apprehensive in purchasing the board/screen kit together because of the reviews. This thing has a 2.4/5 rating with only 4 reviews. The first one is a 2 star rating because it is not open source. I don't care as I never did anything with the open source firmware on the 8 bit board anyway. So with closed source, some features may be missing like changing the Esteps from the screen (as this purchaser stated). Fine, change it in the slicer, done...

The next review is a 5 star and stated "Responsive and easy to use".

Third is a 1 star and they stated "Screen is broken and if it wasn't it would still be trash". This customer stated the screen kept freezing and goes on to complain about it not being open source.

The last review is another 1 star and they stated "Don't spend your money or your time". This customer stated the board and screen worked great the first day, and on the second day it "just stopped at the loading screen". He stated he tried to flash it again, no change, Amazon shipped him a new board and he stated "no change".

So those reviews were on there when I was looking at it, but something just didn't seem right. The 4.2.7 board is a very well known board that works amazingly. It takes those loud ass stepper motors and makes them so quiet, I have to keep looking over to see if it is still running. In fact, I read one review on the board only that stated the printer sounds like "it is waiting for a print job". And that is completely true. Now, if you have some really small infill that needs to go in where there is rapid movement, there is noise, but that is mainly the rattle from the probe in the CR Touch. Now, the fans sound SUPER LOUD, even though they are just as loud as they have always been.

Even with those reviews, I figured this is Amazon, if I don't like it, I can return it. So I purchased it along with the CR Touch and a dual drive for the extruder (don't buy this dual drive, more on this in another thread...)

Of course everything showed up on time, because Amazon next day lol. So after work last night, I sat down and swapped over all of the plugs from my 1.1.3 board to the 4.2.7 board. Everything was plug and play, almost in the exact same spot for each plug except for the hot end fan plug, it moved about 6mm up the board, but still the same plug. All of the screw terminals are in the same position, and even the mounting holes are the same. Once I guess "nice" upgrade is that it is micro USB rather than mini USB. I would prefer USB Type C, but whatever.

Once I was done plugging everything into the main board, I screwed on the touch screen, placed the first firmware file into an SD card, and turned it on. If flashed no issue, but was in chinese, and even though I found the correct folder to change the language, it would not change. I then did some more research, and found the firmware below. Remember, this is for the 4.x.x boards and for the touch screen with touch and for the BL Touch or CR Touch.

The touch screen is quite responsive for what it is and the menu layout is quite nice. One thing that I absolutely LOVE about this new firmware/screen is, if you are on a screen, it does not default to home in 10 seconds, it will stay there allowing you to adjust the temp, feed or offset. It is very quick to go through the menu's and even when it is printing, you have a stop, cancel and settings button that you can click. In the settings, you can adjust on the fly the hotend and bed temp and your Z Offset. This is fantastic when you are just starting to play with the offset as you can print one circle, and try one offset, when it moves to the next circle, you can change it by 0.05mm and test again.

Today is my second day of using it I guess you could say as I received it yesterday, and installed it last night. I woke up today and did more playing with the bed (more on that in THIS THREAD) and it is sitting next to me right now running, and printing out the final piece for the storage I wanted to put on the printer.

IMO at this juncture, this board/touchscreen combo is worth the money that it costs. Of course time will tell how it lasts as this screen is very new to the market. So you can blow off the reviews of the knuckle heads that are bitching about it not being open sourced, unless you are one of those that likes to play with the firmware files. Again, I'm not one of those people, at least not yet lol. From me, right now, I say get it if you have the funds available. It is WAY BETTER than that stupid dial wheel that jumps 4 clicks per every cog.

Amazon product
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Attachments

  • Ender-3 series Touchscreen firmware(except Ender-3Max).zip
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Tony

Staff member
I'm noticing an issue that I did not have with my other board, and that is the way the board handles the extruder temp. Before, it was a pretty flat line, however now, it starts out heating up to my desired temp, over shoots it a couple degrees, and then turn off to cool down, goes a couple degrees below the target temp, and repeats. So I usually run PLA at about 200C and it will in extreme cases go from 195 to 205. And it's a sinusoidal waveform. If it is a long print, it does get better the longer it goes, but it is still there.

I have not done any research on if we can smooth this out, however if you know of how to do it on the 4.2.7 board, let me know. Doesn't really hurt anything, but looks like trash on the graph...

Take a look at the graph below. It started out with the lighter red line showing where the temp was set, then the darker red line for where the nozzle was. At first, it went up, went a little over, and then evened out. And then all of a sudden, it just went crazy. I will do some research soon, but if you know of anything.. yea... lol

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