Update Firmware On Ender 3 V2

[Ceumar Pee]

Ive updated my Ender 3 with V4.2.7 mainboard, BLTouch and 400XL kit (extends the capabilities of your Creality Ender 3 3D Printer to a 400 mm X, 400 mm Y and a 500 mm Z printing platform). Now I need to update the firmware. YouTube did not provide any help: i.e.: out of date, so cryptic as to be unusable. Marlin & Creality had overly complicated, for what I need, solutions. Trying these led only to frustrations! Any ideas?

If I were doing your upgrade in your place, I would refer to this video for how to compile the firmware for the correct board. I've had to compile firmware for my Ender 3 a few times and I sometimes forget a step. This video is the best that I've found for showing/reminding me of each step.

Essentially, what I think you need to do is compile your firmware as if it were a stock Ender 3 V2 using the settings files I linked above but then change your print area the configuration.h file to match the X400 x Y400 x Z500 print bed area.

There are other changes you'd need to make to the settings file (refer to the video for those). I haven't done your particular upgrade on my machine, so I'm just guessing those extra couple of changes would work for you.

I've done the board upgrade on my Ender 3 Pro. As I've read the BLTouch is easy to install. I'd go over to the Creality forum/help site. You can open a support ticket. They actively have information on firmware in both "release" and "beta" threads. Look there & see if you can get your answers.

Shortly after my post I found this commercial Marlin site 1). It offers firmware for Creality & other printers. You can order 'off the shelf' firmware or customize it yourself. Customizing is quite easy & self explanatory; 5 min. after submitting my requirements, I received a zip file, which I un-zipped & copied the needed file to my SD card. Then I inserted the SD card into my printer & started it. The printer recognized the new firmware & updated its self.

A quick solution is obtaining a pre configured configuration file for this custom extended version of the Ender 3. While it should be very easy to find configurations for Ender 3 with or without BLTouch, the only difference this extension has is an updated printer volume specification. A ready made configuration is found here (please note that it contains an errand for the maximum build height, change #define Z_MAX_POS 250 to #define Z_MAX_POS 500.

But, I then realized that after the firmware upgrade, my printer is ignoring a lot of Cura settings, especially the settings related to speed and acceleration. I proceeded to slow down my print, by a lot, so that the difference in speed will be obvious, but my printer still just prints full speed. (I tried multiple different 3d models, both bigger and smaller ones, but all with the same results).

I have no clue if this is firmware related or if the firmware expects "different" Gcodes now that Cura does not provide in the GCode file. I guess I can just downgrade the firmware again then everything will be fine, but I am hoping one of the community members might have some advice.

I have the same setup and I generally print from Octo. I print with reduced rate with no issues. If you are printing from SD, I'll move one of my "reduced rate" prints to the SD and see what it does.

It's a firmware thing, and not just yours, a deliberate choice on Creality's part. My Ender-3 V3 SE (both on stock and latest firmware) ignores speed and acceleration limits on prints from an SD card so I have to limit the speeds in the machine's firmware. Which is annoying as hell when you're using different materials (i.e. TPU likes to print reeeeeeeal slow). That's one of the reasons why I started using option B:

Printing over OctoPrint is fine because it's only getting one command at a time and doesn't know what'll be coming up so it can't try and plan ahead like that (like if you know you're going to hit a concave corner, you can't go too fast or your jerk will be way too high).

The marketing for the E3V3SE bragged about being able to print at 250mm/s and accelerate at 4000mm/s (until the E3V3KE came out because it goes even faster). Neither of those are particularly good ideas, unless you're using high speed PLA on a printer held in suspension that will stop the large vibrations that can come with moving and turning so fast.

At default acceleration it even started pulling parts of my (PLA) model with it when it started a travel move because it just zoomed off before it had a chance to set (that's why I wrote my own post-processing script to limit acceleration while printing support (yes I know that is an option in Cura) but also on the travel moves before and after the support (which is when it was getting pulled) and Cura just uses the travel acceleration rate for those.

In your case it might be limiting itself purely because it's reached its maximum flow rate and therefore can't print any faster (watch for travel moves). It also depends on the model you're printing, some it doesn't try to speed up on because it doesn't think it can do so without compromising quality.

@Slashee_the_Cow I've considred going Octo, but I like the simplicity of the SD Card (for now). Its just strange that all other settings such as brim, top layers, etc are all still fine (by fine I mean the printer uses whatever I set in Cura), but it is just the speed and accaleration that the new firmware seems to be ignoring.

a) because I like to do things the complicated way where I can - I don't think there's any OctoPrint feature I can't live without, the most interesting (and useful to me) is watching the webcam, but I can do that from my regular computer with a USB extension cable - and if I do it that way, it's a hell of a lot less compressed, and sending commands over USB when when needed (something which can also be fixed with a USB extension cable to reach my PC)

b) because I had a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ that wasn't doing anything after I replaced it with an RPi 4 for my Piputer (boots quick, does most anything I want to do, much bigger screen to do stuff on while laying in bed than my phone).

Its just strange that all other settings such as brim, top layers, etc are all still fine (by fine I mean the printer uses whatever I set in Cura), but it is just the speed and accaleration that the new firmware seems to be ignoring.

Pure speculation here: maybe it doesn't mess with the bottom layer or the top few layers, where doing it too fast is much more more likely to cause noticeable problems? There's probably some info about it on the Creality subreddit if you dare to look. (I don't dare, the quality of Reddit seems to have gone downhill even without interference from Elon Musk.)

I just use the printer's control panel to set reasonable limits, it seems to follow the ones in its firmware. But annoying if I need to do something like print TPU, which likes to go slooooooooooow (for best results I do it at 20mm/s).

@Slashee_the_Cow Lol I like your comment about Elon and Reddit. I found 2 posts on Reddit where people have the same issue, but they don't seem too phased about it. To be honest, the printing speed and quality is a lot better with the new firmware, even on full blast, but I like things to work the way they were intended to work.

That said, I THINK I might have found a possible solution. According to a thread on Github, you have to flash the screen firmware first, and THEN the motherboard. I did it the other way around. Just finishing off a print then I will flash the motherboard again. Will keep you guys posted.

Good thing it's so easy to convince these things a firmware file is newer than the installed version. Bad thing is it's so easy to accidentally load an earlier version of the firmware. Or a good thing, when an update breaks something.

Ok yeah updating the firmware again did not fix it. Sigh. Back to Googling and trying to find a solution. Otherwise this might be the swift kick that I need to switch over to Octa. I also have a Raspberry Pi 3b+ lying around looking for work.

Figured I will post an update here. I downgraded my printer firmware to Feb 2023 firmware. But, same issue, it just prints full speed! It does not seem to care about the print or accaleration settings from Cura. So this is most likely not a firmware issue some other random obscure thing I have no clue where to check...

Could depend on your definition of "issue". Several Creality printers ignore speed/acceleration settings from gcode files. At least on my E3V3SE, I can use the control panel to manually turn down the max speed and acceleration because nobody needs to be accelerating at 4000mm/s anyway! (Although that's not to say that that's what's happening in your case.)

I think the reason it happens when you print from the printer but not OctoPrint is because the printer can preprocess the whole gcode file if it's printing it itself, so can figure out where it can break the speed limit, whereas OctoPrint spoon feeds it commands line by line so it doesn't know what's coming.

OK, all back to normal again. Just did a couple of prints and my printer is listening to Cura again. Not sure what happened with the first print after rolling back firmware, but all is good. Thanks for everyone's support!

I recently tried to update the firmware of my ender 3 v2 neo but the screen is stucked on creality screen. I followed all the recomendations like sd format to 4096 allocation unit size, put only the .bin file in the root of the sd, rename the .bin to something like 123.bin and nothing is working

Sorry to hear your having issues with the printer. I would recommend double checking that you are using the correct firmware, I notice that there are several versions for that printer depending on if you have bed leveling probe and/or a filament sensor. If you are sure that you have flashed the correct firmware and it still doesnt work I would suggest contacting Customer Support: c...@creality.com

I want to scream at Creality as @foosel requested in his post.

OctoPrint doesn't show a temperature graph for my Creality printer

I received my Ender 3 Pro yesterday and expected to use OctoPrint with it.

It wasn't until I connected the Rpi to the printer that I realized the firmware has a problem.

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