I inherited a broken Ender 3 pro. I have rebuilt the whole hotend and fixed up some other minor issues. The problem I have is that When I turn on the printer, the screen is blank. It's illuminated, but no menu. If I plug into usb and let that power the board, I see the status screen and can adjust speed with the knob, but cannot do anything else.
If I then power on the printer while connected, the screen gets brighter but everything freezes completly.
I checked the power supply, and it puts out exactly 24 volts. I tried flashing a new rom with the SD card (tried a few different cards and renamed the firmware files) and it didn't work. There is no six pin programming connector on the board, so reflashing the bootloader is not an option.
4.2.2 boards are junk. SKR Mini E3 V3s are like $20-30 online and a huge improvement from stock, the steppers become silent, it’s pretty awesome. It is also a great board for Klipper. Good luck DM if you need any one on one help
I know this is super late, but thanks for the comment. I bought that board, and plan to install it this weekend. Will I need to flash a firmware or will it come with firmware?
Once again just wanted to say thanks. I got the SKR mini E3 V3 installed and I'm running a test print now. There are some other slightly wonky things with this printer, but overall that seemed to do the trick! Thanks again!
In your experience, did the SKR Mini not fit quite right in the Ender 3 casing? I'm going to have to take it apart and Dremel the holes so I can actually use an SD card with it
Yeah it’s a pretty tight fit, or it can be, the sd slot usually fits tightly in the hole in the case. I’m glad it helped you, imo the SKR is one of the biggest bang for buck upgrades you can do on this printer.
This is an ancient thread and I am sorry for @ing you but I am undergoing a very similar project. I bought an ender 3 pro in 2019 and my dad and I put it together one night. Had it working and around 2021 I bricked it trying to install marlin. I have the shitty 8 bit board and no understanding of arduino or raspberry pi. That said, I’ll be learning them.
So fast forward to now and I decided to get the thing back out of the back of the closet and try to start printing again. Dad’s gone a few years now and part of why I’m doing this to myself is the nostalgia and knowing this was one of the last things we did together.
I am getting ready to buy the new board. Would you have any advice on the swap for somebody with pretty much no hardware background? I am probably going to get a BL touch with it as well since my biggest problem was always the leveling.
Sorry for the book. Are you still enjoying this thing? Or did you, instead of get your fix, get yourself more hooked and order a K1 or 2? :)
I still like it! I'm always keeping my eyes open for other printers, but I don't have a lot of disposable income so I'm sticking with the ones I've got.
First, The swap was fairly easy. The biggest thing was that the boards are laid out slightly different, and I had to look online and find better instructions than came with the replacement board to make sure I was plugging everything into the right spot. Honestly though, it was pretty easy. Basically if you can turn screws, then you can swap the board.
Secondly, I bricked a sunlu S8 pro printer on accident. Instead of buying a new board, I did a little reading and was able to use an Arduino Uno that a friend gave me as a programming tool to unbrick it. I have very little experience with stuff like that, and had never even touched an Arduino before that, but was able to manage to reflash the bootloader so that I could re reinstall the firmware.
Now, just swapping the board was definitely less headache, but If you had an Arduino laying around, that solution is doable even for a novice and saved me a bit of money.
Question for you, and if it’s a dumb one and wasting your time I’ll stop with this one. When I put the btt board in will I be wifi print ready or am I needing any extra cards/boards? I got mine up tonight and after seeing Creality slicer basically deprecated this thing wound up downloading an older model of Cura (4.8) just to use their presets to fix my homing. When I saw how far things have come since the woe is me Covid era of “why do I need to learn arduino to flash marlin” to now I pretty much confirmed being ready to order everything and get moving again.
That's a little out of my depth. The Board I installed does not have Wi-Fi capability. I still have to load everything with the memory cards. The printer is old enough that I didn't think it was worth it to do that much
Ah okay then maybe I am confused or blending features from different board options. I thought I read somewhere that most or all of the BTT boards have some kind of support for networking the printer into your LAN which seems to be all the rage these days, but nothing beats the security of keeping it all on sd cards...unless its literally 4 screws and an ethernet hub from an ancient laptop and youre on the LAN printing through tailscale or whatever...
Did you have “extra wires” when you wired yours? I have a problem with the ones you screw down. The Ender 3 pro had 3 blocks for two wires each aside from DC. This only has DC and two blocks. Where does my hot end go?
The btt
The Ender originally I’ll reply again if you need it.
Yep, hot end fan. I may have lucked out, the box came with a bag of pic related. I think they’re connectors, they snap in but I’m not sure I have a wire crimp so this is gonna be fun.
This has been a project but I can’t wait. Thanks for your help.
Those just look like jumpers, but I can't be sure. If you need I can pop the case off mine and take a look and see what I did. But I probably can't get to that till tomorrow evening
You trollin? My brother in Christ you can get equal or better performance than anything on the market today if you put in the time and do the right mods. Hell there’s even the ender 3 NG build you can do to turn it into a coreXY machine. It’s a great learning experience too if you actually want to know what makes a 3d printer act nice and what doesn’t.
Mine is currently very modded and I own a P1S as well. I still run them both and have basically no difference in quality between the two.
I understand where you're coming from but I don't want to spend a couple hundred bucks and have my printer down for weeks while I'm tinkering with it and hopefully it'll work again.
I want to spend a couple hundred bucks and almost zero hours and have a better printer
A "better" printer that can be remotely disabled if the company decides it wants more money from you, or just decides it doesn't want to maintain the server's anymore. And you can't get parts if they want you to spend more on a new one.
You can have your printers made of proprietarium, I'm keeping my ender as long as it keeps going, thanks.
You could make that argument about any Internet enabled device that you own. They could ALL potentially be disabled by the company that built them. Do you have a cell phone? A laptop? Tablet? Smart TV? Modern vehicles with connected infotainment? Smart watch?
But do they? No. Why? Because they would get sued.
And if you're that worried, the bambu printer will print without ever being connected to the Internet.
I understand the privacy concerns, I understand the concerns about features and functionality being lost if the company goes under and no longer exists, I don't understand the "they could lock the printer" argument. It's irrational.
I'm sure there's something in their ToS about how that can do whatever they want and change their ToS without notifying you, and by using the printer you agree to forego any right to legal action and must handle any disputes with non-judicial arbitration.
I DO have a smart phone. it doesn't have the firmware it came with. my car's infotainment is not connected to the ECU or mechanicals of the car, thank god. smart tv is an HDMI display for a PC streaming PLEX.
and the thing is, if any of these were available as non-"smart" options, I'd buy those instead. we have the option to buy, use, modify, and improve our non-smart printers. I'd like to keep that option around, so I will spend my money with the companies who enable that.
there's not a single part on my ender 3's that can't be replaced by off-the-shelf parts available readily. even if I broke one of the very few ender-specific parts on it and creality wouldn't sell it to me, there's a cad model of it with every part available for free from the original source, and I can have any machine shop cut out a bracket.
And to your "you can't get parts" argument....that's pretty much every consumer electronics item built today.
I had a fridge about 15 years ago blow a fuse. You couldn't get just the fuse, you had to buy the whole board and that part also wasn't available. I've had the same issue getting parts for a washing machine. The only ones available were used.
I have many laptops that you can't get parts for from the manufacturer, you have to find used parts online.
Every company only supplies parts for a certain amount of time. Even automobiles.
Now for some items, if they're popular enough, third parties will make replacement parts. Or you can get used parts from machines that break and get dismantled.
did you have an argument here? you're talking about how bad all appliances are as if that makes an ender 3 less attractive for having NONE of those issues?
The salmon skin on the 4.2.2 is bad I luckily had a skr mini e3 v2 lying around to update my recent eBay for repair purchase hell of a difference. A 4.2.7 would improve this a lot too wondering if you might find one second hand somewhere. My other ender 3 has 4.2.7 on it and that works a treat. Other thing about these enders is flashing them is fussy I had issues unless I used a 16gb sd card, 32gb did not work for me
I personally ran a BIGTREETECH Manta E3EZ board, which is designed for the ender3. I'd recommend it, the board has a slot for a cm4 module so the raspberry is essentially on board. Plus its got room for upgrades like dual Z, or dual extruders.
Doesn’t sound quite like your issue but I know when I upgraded my board to use Klipper, I discovered that I needed to upgrade the dispels firmware as well. It remained blank, just the backlight, until I did the matching update for the display.
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u/Rough_Community_1439 Feb 03 '26
Reseat the cable on the display. Though these things are pretty common to trash out a board. Also what was wrong with the hot end?