Hello 3D Printing Friends! Today on the BV3D channel,
we'll learn how to format a MicroSD card for use
with a 3D printer. Stick around and we'll get into it
right after this. I'm Bryan, and you... are watching BV3D!
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Okay, so today we're going to learn how to format a
MicroSD card for a 3D printer, and I'll show both the Mac and the Windows way.
So this is a little bit different from my usual videos about 3D printing,
but the reason I'm making this video is that I've been doing a lot of other
videos about upgrading to, editing and compiling, and otherwise installing and using
the JyersUI Marlin firmware on certain Creality printers.
I refer, of course, almost exclusively to the Ender-3 V2, because JyersUI
is designed specifically to work with that printer's color LCD screen.
But I think that any 3D printer using a Creality version 4.2.2 or
4.2.7 main board, and the Ender-3 V2 screen is a candidate for the JyersUI upgrade.
In fact I did this recently with an Ender-3 Max,
turning it into what I called an Ender-3 Max V2 Pro.
But one of the things that crops up in the comments on these videos is that, occasionally,
people have trouble convincing their printer to read the firmware file from the card in order
to update itself.
However, comments from people who have trouble updating the firmware on the LCD screen are FAR
more numerous. And I believe this is because the LCD is really a tiny computer,
and it is VERY picky about the capacity and
format of the cards it can read.
For both main board and screen firmware updates,
the solution seems to be, "Use a card that's 8GB or less, formatted as FAT32, with 4K
(or 4096) byte allocation units.
Okay, but how do you actually DO that?
Well, that's what I'm here to show you today.
I'll show you how to do that on Windows, and I'll show you how to do that on a Mac.
First, let's do this on Windows.
Oh, Pro Tip: Use the chapter markers here on YouTube
if you want to skip ahead to the Mac version.
So this is Windows 10, shown here running in a virtual machine. I'll insert the 8GB MicroSD card
that came with my printer into a card reader connected to the computer, and then it shows up
here as drive F:. Right-click it, and select Format.
Here you can see that the card's capacity is 7.39 GB,
the default option for the file system is FAT32. There are other options,
but FAT32 is what we want. And the allocation unit size is set to 4096 bytes.
There are other values available, but 4096 bytes is what's needed. The Volume Label is the name of
the card, and these always seem to be set to No Name.
I like setting them to the name of the printer, if I can, so i'll set this
a little less-generically to ENDER-3. Last, there's the option to perform a
Quick Format. It may be okay to leave that checked,
but if you use the Quick Format option, and your printer or its screen STILL don't like your card,
you may need to re-RE-format with the Quick Format option unchecked. Since I want to eliminate the
possibility of Quick Format being a problem, I'm going to uncheck the option.
And then I'll click the Start button. A warning
appears to let us know that formatting the card erases its contents. If there's anything on the
card you want to keep, click Cancel and copy those files into a folder on your desktop.
I don't have anything important on this card,
so I'm going to click the OK button. This progress bar shows the progress of the formatting process.
Since I'm using the non-Quick Format option, this process is non-quick. In fact, this took about
20 minutes to complete. It's definitely one of those
go-do-something-else-for-a-while, grab-a-snickers-bar kind of things.
But eventually a dialogue box reveals to us that the passage of time has brought satisfaction, and
the formatting process is complete. And I'm okay with that,
so I'll click the OK button. And then I'll close the Format window.
Now the card is properly formatted for firmware upgrades on your 3D printer!
OK Windows people, you're done! But before you go, maybe give the video a like,
and maybe also subscribe? Okay, cool, see you later!
Now let's do this on a Mac.
I'll insert the 8GB MicroSD card that came with my printer into a card reader connected to the
computer, and then it shows up on the Desktop as NO NAME. And that's not because it doesn't have
a name. It DOES have a name. Its name is NO NAME.
Sort of like those pages you sometimes see, that say THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
The page isn't blank, it has words on it. But the words say that the page is blank.
Weird. Well, anyway, getting back to the subject,
all disk formatting operations on a Mac are handled by Disk Utility. You can get there from
the Finder by clicking the Go menu, then selecting Utilities, which opens the Utilities folder.
Double-click the Disk Utility icon in there.
Disk Utility lists available volumes in the sidebar
on the left side of its window. These are grouped
into Internal and External categories. The MicroSD card named NO NAME is in the External category.
Pro Tip: If you have any other external disks connected to your Mac, you might want to eject
them and physically unplug them from the computer so you don't accidentally format them.
And don't mess with ANYTHING in the Internal category.
This is where your computer's hard drive lives. It's probably best to just close up that category
entirely. Disk Utility's standard view shows you the volumes, not the actual devices the volumes
reside on. We need to target the MicroSD card DEVICE
to ensure it has the correct format, so we need to tell Disk Utility to show us that information.
Click View, and select Show All Devices. You'll see a bit of a change in the sidebar. For one,
Disk Utility had additional information to show in the Internal category, so it expanded it again.
So I'll close it up again. Now, in the External list, you'll see that the volume named NO NAME
resides on a thing called Generic MassStorageClass Media. THAT is the thing we need to format, so
click on that in the list. Now Disk Utility shows us a bunch of information about this device.
We can see that its capacity is 7.95 GB, it's located
externally to the computer, connected via USB, and it has a Master Boot Record partition type.
Since we're here to erase and reformat this card, click Erase here on the toolbar. And just a quick
reminder, "Erase" means whatever's on the card right now, won't be on it when this process is
complete. If there's anything on the card you want to save, drag those files into a folder on
your desktop.
Disk Utility will prompt for three things. I'm going to approach these in reverse order.
First, set the partition scheme, which needs to be Master Boot Record. Second, we need Disk
Utility to format the card as FAT32, so set Format to MS-DOS (FAT). And third, Disk Utility
wants a name for this, so we'll set that to something short. I like to name the cards for
the printers they go with, when I can, so I'll call this ENDER-3. Disk Utility is forcing this
to all caps, by the way. With all of that set, click the Erase button. Disk Utility shows the
details of what it did, and here you can see that it chose to use 4096 bytes per cluster,
which corresponds to the 4K, or 4096 byte allocation units that this needs to be
formatted with. Disk Utility chose that value automatically, and I don't have any control
over it. But I think that's a pretty standard value for an 8 GB card. Plus, every time I've
used Disk Utility to format these 8 GB cards for firmware upgrades, they've worked.
Anyway, click the Done button, and then close Disk Utility's window. Now the card is
properly formatted for firmware upgrades on your 3D printer!
So there you go. Now you've got both Mac and Windows instructions to help you format memory
cards for use with your 3D printer.
If you've been having trouble, hopefully this quick little guide will help.
Well, 3D Printing Friends, that's about all the time we have for this episode! And now
that we're at the end, let's go print something cool!
Hey, real quick before you go, I wanted to say Thanks! for being one of the Super Awesome
People who sticks around all the way to the end,
and thanks for all the likes, comments, and shares.
And an especially big thanks to those who
directly support what I do. You're all wonderful for doing that, and I really appreciate it!
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Well, that's it for this one. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time here,
on the BV3D Channel!