on today's makers mashup we're taking the first look at the skr2
so on today's makers mashup we're going to be looking at the skr2 now this is the next one
in line from the skr series if you've had an skr-13 or 4 the skr2 is the next in the line of
skr 3d printer main board now this new main board does have a lot of interesting new features
one of which is an arm cortex m4 168 megahertz processor which also includes an fpu so this is
the first floating point unit processor on the skr main boards now big tree tech has also made
a number of other different upgrades to this board and kept a lot of the same features from
the 1.4 board we're going to be covering all of these step-by-step and going over a
side-by-side comparison of the boards today and we're going to be showing you all the different
features that this new board has and some of the gotchas that it has as well so with all that said
let's get to work okay so here we have the skr2 and this is in the retail packaging so we're going
to open this up and you can see we have the same cheesy usb cable that comes with all of them our
little rubber duck and we've got the big tree tech business card let's pull the main board out and
we will see here that we've got some jumpers in there and the main board itself
now this is a brand new one i did for the video i did have another one of these that i opened up
uh for my own evaluation but i wanted to open this live for you
so we're gonna pull the main board out and we'll set that down on my silicone mat
and let's see if we can get a better view of this board
okay so here we have the two boards side by side now this side here you can see we have the skr
virtual 1.4 turbo and on this side we have the skr2 now the overall form factor of these are
pretty much identical they both have the same bolt pattern where they will attach to your 3d printer
and then one of the big changes that i've noticed here on this
is that they now have this usb connector here which is designed for udisc or essentially a usb
drive or hard drive you've also got an sd slot here that is a bit different than
the turbo now on the 1.4 turbo what we had here was an sd card that inserted all the way in
and on the skr2 what you find is that we have a different type of sd card slot where the disk
pushes in but it is not spring loaded so that is a complete design change now the result is that
the sd card sticks out much further and we'll go over that in a little bit now some of the
other changes you might immediately notice is that these larger fuses are now replaced with
these much smaller ones now that does save space in the overall design and gives the developers a
little bit more room and as you can see they've used this space for a variety of different chips
some of the other things that you may notice right off the bat is that these are now removable or
detachable connections for your heater so you can wire up the board and then wire in those
connections and then push them in these are push fit so if you see here i'll just pull one out
and there you can see that these are removable so that will make assembly just a little bit easier
and i like this design but i don't know how these typically last long term as far as whether or not
they stay connected my old race cube had something similar and i never had a problem with it so along
with the heater changes you'll also note that there is a whole row of fan pins here these are
the three controllable fan pins on the board and each one can independently be controlled with pwm
in comparison to the skr14 which only has one now this might be handy if you wanted to control
multiple things on your 3d printer and turn fans on and off you could even have a large fan that
covered the entire bed of your 3d printer that would go ahead and blow cool air and you could
control that through one of these pins now this is a minor change but you can see we had two fan
pins here before and now we have two fan pins here so they move things around just a little bit there
now when we talk about the end stops the end stops are identical on both boards and then
you also have your filament detection here and then you also have your power detection here
so those remain the same between the two boards the bl touch connections also remain the same as
you can see these are the bl touch connections and these are the bl touch connections here so that
way you have your servos and the probe now this is a little bit tighter so you'll have to reference
the documentation to know what some of these pins are because they did tighten things up here
the tft display has moved from here over to here so that took up the space and why you can't see
on the silk screen anymore that this is for the bl touch big treetech has also changed the wi-fi
connection in this this was the previous wi-fi connection for an esp8266 and now they've added
a dedicated port here and a connector that will allow you to plug in what looks like very much
like a wemos but it's an 8266 into these two pins here and they sell that separately for the board
now the wi-fi connector is required if you're going to install reprap firmware and you're
going to have to get the proprietary connector versus this connector that you can pretty much
get everywhere so there's a little bit of a change there but i would expect this component to
be very cheap considering that the board cost is under fifty dollars so you can see big tree tech
also kept all of their closed-loop stepper connections i don't know anyone that's really
using closed-loop steppers if you are leave me a note down in the description i've seen a number of
videos and i have a couple of closed loop steppers here myself but i find there's really no use on
most 3d printers for those because you can usually adjust the current or change your printer tuning
to make that work successfully but i would be excited to hear about those of you that are
using closed loop steppers so for those of you using the skr and using 2209s or other drivers
with sensorless homing you're familiar with the fact that if you're going to use sensorless homing
you need to use the 2209s here for your x and y but then where the problem comes in is that you
had to clip the pins for your z and your extruder if you wanted to use 2209s across the board
which pretty much committed you to never using sensorless homing with a particular driver
big tree tech has changed this in that there is a jumper here now
that with the configuration of setting this jumper you no longer have to clip the pin here to use a
22.9 on these other drivers most people won't use a 2209 and stencil is homing on the z and
obviously there's no use for that on your extruder ports so being able to buy a package of 2209
and then not clip the pin and using just the jumper is a great addition in my opinion
so one of the features that they've added is an anti-reverse function so if you have a stepper
driver and you install it incorrectly it's supposed to protect the board from
short-circuiting and causing a problem however the documentation on the website says that it's only
available in the marlin firmware i'm not sure how that's completed but it is nice that they
have some safety features involved i've always found it pretty simple to install these correctly
simply because they do have these color coded ones so unless you're buying an off-brand
driver it's really hard to hook these up without paying any attention at all to what you're doing
some of the other additional features here that i'm not sure how they work
but big tree tech claims that there's an anti-thermal runaway circuit here in their
documentation now it doesn't go into how this anti-thermal runaway circuit works but i would
rely on the firmware for thermal runaway it's nice though if there's a hardware based version of this
and i'd like to try in a future video on testing this to see if this works by itself or requires
the firmware to really be effective big tree tech has kept the thermistors in the same spot on
each of these boards however the new skr2s have a advanced protection circuit for these thermistors
now there have been a number of reports where these thermistors will get shorted and then what
will happen is it will fry the entire board and that advanced thermistor protection circuit is
to prevent that sort of burnout i'd be interested to see how effective that is in the wild another
thing that was preserved was the port for the neopixels this is the neopixel port on the 1 4 and
1 4 turbo and the same thing exists on the skr2 so let's talk about a few gotchas of this new skr2
the first one i want to talk about is this new sd card those of you that were familiar with the 1 4
and the other skr lines will know that most of the sd cards push in and then they're spring loaded
and come out this one is much different when you push this in that's all you do now that does have
a nice advantage that if you had a 3d printed part and that 3d printed part was coming up to say here
you would be able to easily pull this out so this will work really well for an ender upgrade
where you want to replace the main board and you have the 3d printed case it will make accessing
this sd card much easier however if you're not using an skr the thing that you're not going to
like about this is that this does stick out this really is waiting to get snapped off in my opinion
but i can see advantages with either option so just be mindful that this is sticking out
a lot further than you've noticed before in the past with the skr boards so let's talk
a little bit about some of the new features and the documentation so the ps on feature right here
is for a power relay and this is a dedicated pin so when the main board shuts down this sends a
signal to the relay which shuts down everything and powers down the entire board and any other
peripherals now i've seen these sort of relays before but it's interesting that we now have
a dedicated pin on the skr2 so one of the things that i thought was a bit odd was that if you want
to use this u-disc connection and these jumpers control that the wi-fi connection is then disabled
or if you're using the wi-fi connection then the u-disk is disabled so they're mutually exclusive
components according to the documentation and if you're using reprap firmware you have to use the
wi-fi connection which means that you can't use this usb connection on the front so it's just
kind of an odd design choice i understand that most users using reprap firmware will want to
do it wirelessly but i think it would be nice to have the option to use both on this board
so the skr2 really has a much better processor on it and it does have some new circuit protection
and a few other minor features but overall it's for the most part very much an skr144
turbo with a couple of different additions it's not a huge revamp of the board it is simply
an additional upgrade from what the 1 4 and 1 4 turbo were already providing so let's talk
about a couple of gotchas with this board that hopefully this will save you a little bit of time
first when you're compiling the firmware if you're familiar with the one four and the one three you
know that if you simply plug in the usb cable it comes up with a flash drive that's accessible so
that way you can load firmware onto it directly from your ide that's changed considerably in that
you no longer have that ability and it is a footnote at the very bottom
of the skr documentation where you'll now have to manually copy the build file over to an sd card
of which this board does not include an sd card so make sure you buy one with it when you buy this
board you'll need to get your own sd card and then you'll load this firmware onto it and then from
there you place it in the board and then that will load the firmware onto the skr2 so it's a little
bit of an inconvenience and if you're doing this for the first time you wouldn't necessarily know
that you would need to copy this file manually and of course the ide just pops up with an error which
is very frustrating because you don't know why it won't upload unless you read the documentation
thoroughly i ran into this myself i'm a maker i'm just going to hack at this so when it wouldn't
upload i started doing a little research including reading the manual and then from there i ended
up discovering that you have to copy this file manually so a little bit of frustration there not
the end of the world but something to definitely look out for with this new version of the board
so overall i think it's a pretty exciting new board i'll be interested to see how it performs
hopefully we don't run into some of the bugs that we ran into with the 1.4 early on it would be
really interesting to see how this board performs once i get marlin loaded on that and i'll also
have some upcoming videos showing some of those uh different things as far as compiling the firmware
and getting drivers in that installed so with that it's going to bring the end of today's video
if you enjoyed it make sure you mash that like button and don't forget to share and subscribe
so you don't miss our upcoming videos i also want to put a special thanks to all of the
patreon members i did give them a little bit of preview to some of this board uh in our discord
channel and i definitely suggest you check out our discord channel there's a lot of great makers in
there that can help you getting this board up and running and links for all that are down in
the description so with that i want to say thanks again for watching and we'll see you all next time
you