4.2.7 Motherboard
Karriem Drewery
When the print started, the bed heated up to the requested 60 C, and then started warming the print head to 210 C. Once the print head reached 205 C, the temperature started to drop. It dropped back down to 200 C, then up to 202 C then down to 198 C and so on. It kept doing the up and down heating until it dropped to 190 C at which point the E1 error was displayed. I have run through the cycle several times with different prints, and through the menu options; and it always fails in the same up and down way.
After checking in with the Ender 3 group on Facebook and doing quite a bit more research I tracked the problem down to PID calibration. The default settings for the board were not heating the print head properly. Because it was coming in short, the thermal runaway logic on the new board cut in and shut everything down.
To fix the problem, the printer needs to run a PID autotune. This is a good idea when you replace any part between the nozzle and the logic board. To accomplish the autotune you need to access the printers console through an app such as Pronterface. You should also take care when hooking in a USB cable to the printer. The 4.2.7 board runs power to the USB port. To get the printer connected to your computer, you will need to mask off the power pin on the USB cable (with the possibility of blowing the chip on the board if you skip this step)
Important Safety Tip - The 4.2.7 board draws more power than the old 8 bit board. During my first test print after the PID calibration, the connector between the power supply and the motherboard melted down. It seems that the wires were crimped rather than soldered. This was fine with the old board, but it was too much with the added power draw. The poor connection caused the wires in the connection to over heat. This is a fire hazard.
Check the power connector. remove the shrink wrap and take a close look. If you don't see solder on the joint, replace it. It is worth the slight expense and hassle to avoid ruining your printer and potentially starting a fire.
NOTE: The power supply and the hotend fan are distinguished by positive and negative poles, please follow the instructions on the motherboard to connect: "+ "stands for positive, "- " stands for negative
For the V4.2.7 board, please copy the firmware file to a formatted SD card with no other files in it. Turn off the printer and unplug the power cord.
Insert the SD card & power cord and turn on the printer. Wait 10s to complete the firmware updating process.
(we recommend a SD Card is in 8-16Gb)
Installing a new Creality Silent v4.2.7 motherboard. Trying to determine where I would plug in the wire from an add-on filament sensor. All the ports on the motherboard are marked with a label except one. It's a 3 pin port next to the green power ports. Wonder if that is the right one. Tried it on my old v4.2.2 motherboard, which now will not boot (not sure this was the problem).
Thanks! This is what I thought. I was under the impression that the new 4.2.7 silent motherboard would see the filament sensor by default. I read something somewhere that indicated the 4.2.7 will work without having to update the firmware. Guess I find out tomorrow.
How to I determine the correct wires to connect the sensor to J1? J1 is marked V G S for the pins on the underside of the motherboard, but I do not understand how those connect to the sensor. Any ideas?
I was under the impression that the new 4.2.7 silent motherboard would see the filament sensor by default. I read something somewhere that indicated the 4.2.7 will work without having to update the firmware.
Prior to the mobo upgrade, everything was working fine. Now I'm having problems with the extruder.I did use at first the Ender3 32bit 4.2.7 firmware, but it did happens too.The e-steps for the filament length have been adjusted. Once I start spinning the extruder, the extruder stepper starts grinding and jumping/rewinding the extruder wheel with the filament to the back; sometimes even 8-10 mm. Also, if I manually hold the filament back, it springs back. It seems that there is no power/power coming from the stepper motor.
Depending on the driver, you need to find out what the maximum Vref for your stepper is (this depends on the maximum current rating of your stepper), e.g. for 2208, 2209 and 2225 drivers the Vref is calculated by the same equation:
If the extruder is not having an issue with the old board installed, you'll need to visit Creality's Updates page and install the Marlin 2.0 firmware designed for the 4.2.7 board. Please use a how-to video on YouTube for installing your new board, you will need to calibrate E-Steps, calibrate PID Temperatures, etc. as outlined in the video.
If the extruder continues its behavior, the extruder is under-extruding. Please check out The Holy Bible of 3D Printing troubleshooting: Underextruding printer to get to the bottom of it before you upgrade to your new silent board. Then I can pretty much guarantee you have either a clogged nozzle or a hotend that's too cold during printing to melt the plastic at a fast enough rate.
The third thing is you need to upgrade the stock Ender 3 extruder because the stock black extruder bracket is absolute garbage, and it alone would cause a skipping and flaking extruder. Get the sweet stainless grey one for 15 USD on amazon. Blame Creality for that oversight.
Personally I would recommend getting the 4.2.2 board as there seems to be more firmwares for the 4.2.2 than the 4.2.7 and also some people sometimes have issues with the touch probes on the 4.2.7 boards.
Glad to hear the new board is working ok, unfortunately I cant help with the bl-touch issues as I have seen several others swap the boards and run into this issue with no real resolution to the issue. Some say the issue is due to the cable used for the touch probe. Apparently there are 2 types of cables, ones with the split and ones without, the ones without the split cable are supposedly suitable for the 4.2.7 boards.
Hi @Nikoli
thanks a lot for your answer. I modified the connector as you suggested. Now the BL-Touch works too.
I use the Marlin 2.0.6 firmware. But I miss the Z-probe wizzard in the configuration menue. Is there any way to activat this?
Hello @jmartens1114 ,
thanks for your answer.
I use this firmware version: Ender3Marlin2.0.6HW4.2.7BLTouch.bin which I donwnloaded from the Ender homepage.
But there is no z probe whizzard activated. Which firmware fits to this one but with the z probe whizzard. Or do I need a source code to modify and compile?
I recently found out about the v2 motherboard upgrade (Motherboard V4.2.7 with TMC2225) for the Ender 3. It is a great idea and not very expensive or hard to do. The reasons for doing the upgrade are you replace the 8 bit board with a 32 bit board and the new board comes with Silent stepper motor drivers. They may the printer run silent except for the power supply fan which I added a cover over to quite down some.
Then I found out the new board supports the BLTouch and filament sensor connectors so I thought great I will just buy a BLTouch and plug it in because I always wanted to have self leveling. If I had know everything needed to do this up front to install the BLTouch it might have scared me away. In addition to purchasing the BLTouch I needed a 1.5 meter extension cable (which I made for 22 gauge wire) and I needed to upgrade the firmware and enable the BLTouch. (To do this I had to install VSCode and you need to install the PlatformIO IDE extension for VS Code prior to building.)
You've probably heard about it - Every 3D-Printer manufacturer is nowadays putting 32 bit mainboards into their new models. It's pretty much time to acknowledge that 8 bit boards have no future and will have disappeared from the market very very soon.
Since there is still quite a lot of you out there who are still on the 8 bit 1.1.4, 1.1.5 or similar mainboard versions, I am showing you today how to swap out that old mainboard for the brand new Creality 4.2.7, so let's get into it.
The stepper motor cables have these little helpful labels but the fan cables and the heater and sensor cables mostly aren't labeled so make your life easier and put some labels on those, too, maybe take a photo just in case.
It fits in the same place as the old mainboard - but since the power cables are probably the hardest to re-insert into the terminals because they are quite short at least in my case, I am starting to attach them first. Please double check the right polarity of those cables, so the red cable goes into the plus and the black into the minus terminals. You find that information on the backside of the mainboard.
We should now be ready to close the electronics case, don't forget to connect the case fan and also any external cables like the display cable, bltouch, filament runout sensor or what you might have already.
So I would recommend rather to get the latest firmware for your printer and copy that to the SD card to insert this before you power on so you can be sure that the right firmware for your printer will get installed, so let's get this done.
Switching over the wiring and installing the board went without any issue. It was direct plug-and-play. Turning on the printer with the new 4.2.7 board went fine and basic checks passed though did have a very old firmware on it.
Now the fun started. I first picked the wrong firmware to flash. I had gone to the Creality Creative Cloud download section under support which turned out not to be the location I will eventually get the firmware from. I spent probably 2 hours or so figuring this out between the LCD screen buzzing at me trying different firmware options from the bundle I downloaded as well as researching.
Flashing these incorrect firmware options resulted in the buzzer on the LCD display constantly making noise. I later found out that the BLTouch socket in an older firmware pin was used for a buzzer and was repurposed for BLTouch later on when it combined the axis into one connector instead of two. Marlin version was also 1.3.1 of this firmware. So why was the firmware called Marlin2.0.1? I have no clue and blame Creality for poor documentation on the matter.
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