Today we're going to talk about how to install a TFT display by big tree tech on the SKR version 2
Now this display is somewhat unusual and that you can either use TFT or you can use
the legacy Marlin emulator so what I'm going to do is show you how to hook up both at this time
and then we'll go through how they work so what I'm going to do first is I'm actually
going to flip this over so you can see the back side because the front side is kind of obvious
so on the back we have what's known as an SWD port this is used to load firmware on this board but
most people will load it via the SD card there's an individual processor on here
also we have ports for EXP1 and 2 that are down here on this board that we'll
use a ribbon cable to actually work with we also have an SD port and then we have
external power on this particular version for 5 volts that's what it runs on and then
we have our TFT connection right here which is something that corresponds over here on the board
so what I'm going to do now is first show you how to hook up the actual board for the
ribbon cable so I'm going to tilt this board a little and you can see EXP2
so I'm just going to connect that with the notched connector then I'm going to find EXP2 on the board
and do the notch connector as well then what I'll do is I'll connect EXP1 while I'm at it
and then we'll connect both of these back up to the board so this one's coming from EXP1 so we've
got it right here and then we'll do EXP2 right here that's just so that it's easier to work with
so now that we have that actually connected we can test this so what i'm going to do
is I'm actually going to put this in the USB position for power which is these two pins and put
the jumper on that way we can power the board and see if it works so that appears to work and right
now it's currently in the Marlin mode on here because there's two modes if you hold this down
you can then turn this and then click once and it'll bring up the other mode
but this currently will not work until we connect it correctly
so what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to connect the notch connector to the back of this
so I'm going to disconnect the power I'm going to match up the notch right here
and connect it now unfortunately we don't know right away how to connect this this is actually
the reset pin that is separate and then you have your regular pins so we're going to have to look
that up so what we're going to do is we're going to go over to the browser in a second
and we're actually going to check to see what that actual configuration
is so what I'm gonna do is I'll show you the actual website in two seconds here
so here's the actual website this is for GitHub for BigTreeTech so I'm gonna click on
repositories just so you can see how to search and type TFT and this will bring up a bunch of
different TFT(s) but that's not what we're looking for right now we're looking for our board which is
SKR and we'll say space 2 so I'll click on that then I'll go over to hardware and I'll find the
file that says pins so inside this file you'll notice it says TFT right here and then over
here it says 5 volts ground PA9 PA10 those are our pin out numbers and then we have a reset so
now we know how to install it so we're going to go back over the display and set this up
so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to align these like so so I know the resets here I'm going
to then connect these first four pins and then we'll connect the last one which is reset down
here so now if we were to pull the plug on these for just a moment and plug it in it should power
and it does so now that we understand that I'm just going to plug these back in and I'm going
to show you how to configure this in Marlin so in marlin we're going to have to use the SD drive
so in order to do that I have to pull this drive out right here
and I need to put it in this device right here so we can actually load it so I'm going to slide that
in and I'm going to place this in the computer and if you're looking for this particular hardware
I'll put it up on my web page so that you can find it so let's go over to VScode
inside VScode right now what we need to do is actually load the firmware now I've already
downloaded and extracted the firmware so I'm going to click on explorer then open folder I'm
going to go to my downloads folder then Marlin 2.0 Marlin 2.0 then select folder now that it's open
what we need to do is actually configure this so in order to do that they've defaulted you
to the platformio.ini and I just highlighted the default environment which is for a MEGA2560
that's the original configuration for RAMPS we're not using that that's not our chipset so
I'll show you how to sort that out so we're going to go over to the Marlin folder then the source
folder then the core folder then boards.h inside here we're going to search on SKR underscore v2
pardon me and what you can see here are two different boards
now the rev A board is a defective board so you don't want to use that so you're going to
have to check the back of your actual board or the link that I leave in the description
so you can see how to get that replaced Marlin is taking care of that so we're going to use the rev B
board which is right here so I'm going to copy this then I'm going to go back up from source
and go to configuration.h and search on motherboard now that I found the motherboard
I'm gonna highlight the RAMPS board and paste our board over it up here I'm gonna change the serial
port to negative one that's the one that we're using for our motherboard for communication now
these can be reversed but I'm going to remove the comment for the second serial port and this one
we're going to set to 1 that's for our TFT display now I'm going to search on what is it SD support
and this is for your LCD if you're using the Marlin legacy mode now you can pick your own
language obviously so there's many to choose from obviously there's Russian or Ruska Poliska
deutschland or German and various other ones but for now we're going to skip that and just assume
it's english next I'll show you that there's different types of character sets you can work
with but I'm going to leave that alone for the moment and then of course there's different styles
down here there's a CRC support where if we have the SD card enabled and there's an issue you can
set up a retry situation to reread the actual drive but keep in mind there may be a Marlin bug
that causes issues where it won't read off the actual display and it will read off the
card that's inserted in the motherboard it may be fixed by a time of recording this tutorial
but I'm not sure so there are other settings down here that you can change I'm not going to
go over all these but there's different things that you can do like reversing your encoder
and how it actually moves but these are not really relevant at this moment down here there's a reprap
discount smart controller that's not the one we're going to be working with so I'm going to
copy that and paste and find the second one which is the reprap discount full graphics
smart controller so I'm going to remove the comment so we can enable that so I'll click over
here and that will remove the comment now we need to set it up to compile and like we saw before
we went to source core boards.h this is the actual category we're in for the chipset so
we need to find our board and then we need to find out what its abbreviation is so it says
STM32F4 so we're going to minimize this for a moment we're going to go over to the ini
and we're going to find that so it's
STM32F4 so in here we're going to search on SKR underscore v2 and it might not come
up so let's just do skr underscore so we're going to scroll down a little bit and you
should see it right here it's the BigTreeTech SKR underscore 2 so I'm going to copy that
then I'm going to close out of this file and I'm going to go over to platformio.ini
and as you can see this is the set of folders it's actually pointing to over here so we're
just going to highlight the MEGA2560 and paste the big tree underscore SKR underscore
2 here so that we can use it next what we're going to do is we're actually going to clean up our
build because in this case I have the MEGA2560 here so I'm gonna clean that out by clicking here
so as you can see now it's now gone so we're gonna click on the compile or build check box and build
our actual firmware dot bin now keep in mind if this fails the very first time that you compile
try a second time so as you can see in this case it did fail so we're going to try it again and the
reason this may happen is something might build out of order so this happens a third time you're
going to have to go find the very first place where your build fails and correct that issue
because the other issues that follow that may be a cascade of issues that are caused by the first
so as soon as this finishes we're going to go over the dot pio folder for the build then
BigTreeTech SKR and inside here you'll see firmware.bin in a moment so as soon as
this pops as an actual completed build we can right click on it and say view in file explorer
so it's about to happen any second now so here it comes so you're going to see firmware.bin
you're going to right click on that you're going to say reveal in file explorer let
me make this a little bit bigger and then we're going to copy it over to here but my
new habit is I like to delete this this is the old firmware.bin that's been renamed to firmware.cur
they like to call it current but technically it's a cursor file so I'm just going to delete that
for now because it may prevent us from loading the build and then I'm going to go back over
and I'm going to right click on firmware.bin and I'm going to send it
to the E drive now we can double check that it's there so that's all good we'll go back
over to the actual workbench and I'm gonna copy or remove the USB drive and place it inside here
so when we actually load this we're gonna use usb powered because we want to be safe
so it's set to the USB pins so I'm going to take this and I'm going to plug it in
and it will begin to flash down there now a couple of issues that you might encounter when working
with this is the default speed is a quarter million bits so if your LCD comes up as not
connected or no printer attached click on let's see settings then go to in this case connection
then go to baud rate and change your baud rate to a quarter million then go back
then back then back then back and as you can see that issue is now gone now there are other
issues that can occur um one of which is that uh you're not selecting the correct secondary
serial port but we're gonna avoid talking about that for the moment if you're interested in
learning more about how to update the firmware or change this I have a tutorial that I'll put in the
upper right hand corner that you can work with but for the moment what we're going to do is just make
sure we can swap to the other one so I'm going to hold this down I'm going to go over to Marlin mode
and click and as you can see we can see our media menu of things that we can choose from
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