Review on 🖨️ Enhance Your Printer with the Innovative BIGTREETECH Display Controller by Adam Hardy

First of all I have to say that it ended up being a good display with all the features and functionality I was hoping for and it works very well! Now I will tell you about the adventure to get there. lol. I originally ordered this screen a few weeks ago and it arrived very quickly as always. I was excited to rip the printer apart (once again) to install it. Initially I was able to get the 12864 emulation to work, but the touchscreen side would not connect to a printer, it kept saying "No printer connected". I spent a few days checking my serial port configuration and cable pinouts, running around and trying to see if there was a conflict between any of the UARTs and my TMC drivers, which are also in UART mode, etc. Nothing worked as it should, it just refused to work. This was all on an Ender-3 running an SKR 1.3 board with the latest stable Marlin 2.0 firmware. I have another machine with a KFB3.0 board running Marlin 1.1.9 which I upgraded to version 2.0 (to support the use of dual serial ports) and tried to title this board with a TFT screen Set AUX-1 (serial) . It still refused to connect, same problems as before. At this point I decided the board just had a bad UART. I was tempted to remap some pins and compile the firmware to use one of the spare UARTs on the board, but decided to just return it to Revain and get a different one. A second screen appeared a few days later, and it looked like he had been hit by a truck. over him. Literally crushed to the point where the encoder wheel pushed THROUGH the board and came out the other side. lol Impressive! So I immediately started another return. The third screen arrived late but alive and well. This time I connected it to the SKR board and set it up in Marlin, it worked within 15 minutes. Much better. :D At this point I decided to update the screen firmware to get the latest features/fixes and material theme you see in the images. It would be pretty easy if there was better documentation (there is almost none!), but I was able to figure it out. It's actually quite simple once you know how to sort the files on Github and collect what you need in the right folder structure. So here are some tips that might help someone else along the way. In Marlin 2.0, at least for the SKR 1.3 board, you have to do the following in the config. used earlier. This will make the 12864 emulation work Connect the EXP1 and EXP2 cables. Set "#define SERIAL_PORT -1" and "#define SERIAL_PORT_2 0". Set "#define BAUDRATE 115200" In the file configuration_adv.h set "#define SDCARD_CONNECTION ONBOARD". This allows the SKR 1.3 to read data from its own micro SD card slot using the normal Marlin menus as before. The TFT screen can also read data from this card slot using the 'Embedded' option on the screen. You can also use the TFT screen to read and print from the full-size SD card slot or USB port if needed. When updating the display firmware, place the appropriate bin file in the root directory of a full-size SD card and insert it into the display's card slot. (currently the latest is BIGTREE_TFT35_V3.0.25.bin). You also need to customize the font and icon files, otherwise everything on the screen will be messed up and not displayed correctly. It was unclear but to update them you need files in a file structure like root>TFT35>bmp>icon files in this folder and root>TFT35>font>font files in this folder. Hope that helps!