Hey everyone,
I just grabbed an AnyCubic 4Max Pro for insanely cheap. I had to swap out the hot end, it was bent. It seems the last owner had the Z limit switch incorrectly set so it was crashing.
So far it’s printing fairly well. I need to do all the calibration and such, but for ‘out of the box’ it seems to be alright.
I’ve been reading up on the hardware itself and it seems to be fairly crippled due to the board AnyCubic used. An 8 bit board based on the Arduino Mega. I’ve see lots of pre-conpiled firmware for Marlin 2.0.x but they’re usually filled with even more bugs than they solved. The board is called TriGorilla? Honestly I’m use to BTT and Crealitys boards.
Has anyone done a board swap on this? I saw the LCD is a hack job by AnyCubic since Marlin, maybe at the time?, Didn’t support DWIN touch screens. I’d like to keep the stepper drivers, so maybe a board that has removable?
Thanks Henry
Technically you could throw in edit Klipper based board if you wanted to dive into setting up the firmware. It would not surprise me if there isn’t already a klipper or Merlin profile for it. I’m currently converting a tronxy x5sa 400 pro over to a maker base klipper board setup. And even that printer has a profile out in the GitHub that I can modify a bit.
Yeah the issue is AnyCubic seems to have dropped support for this board and any configs online are done by the community. But all of them are guessing the config because AnyCubic didn’t release any code or examples. Very annoying.
Yea, any cubic makes great resin printers but their fdm printers seem to not get the love and attention they deserve. (And that’s coming from someone who bought a tronxy ;) )
From AliExpress I think I roughly spent about 100$ on a makerbase all in one board with a built in pi, a touchscreen for it, and an input shaper board- those 3 parts should let you upgrade the printer and allow for much faster print speed
Hey thanks. I was looking at the makerbase boards, good pricing and features!
Cheers Henry
Generally running Marlin 2 on 8 bit doesn’t work out so well. This is why Prusa MK4 is such an expensive upgrade and why they haven’t been modded much by the community; because of backwards compatibility from their first i3-MK3s+ and the original 8bit boards that ran Legacy Marlin.
I don’t know the hardware involved with this AC M4P, but am into hobby electronics pretty deep, and maybe know enough to get myself into trouble. You can run most printers on klipper firmware if you have a computer running Linux. The Linux computer can be anything from an old PC or laptop to a raspberry pi. I think this is much easier than messing with Marlin 2.
If I’m looking for stuff like firmware, I usually just search github directly. If I can round up half a dozen projects where people have posted their firmware and configuration, I can usually piece something together that works, or at least weed out the bad ones to get a better baseline.
I haven’t had much issue with running Marlin 2.x on Crealitys 8 bits. Of course I stripped out stupid stuff and enabled things like arc and bltouch. It runs totally fine. It’s the lack of storage that was the issue.
With that said storage isn’t so much of an issue with the Mega(atmega2560), the real issue lays with AnyCubic and the mishmash they called TriGorilla.
Thanks!
Cheers Henry
If anycubic did anything similar to what they did on the i3 Mega-S (that I have) on the 4Max, the touchscreen most likely has its own firmware and you need special modifications in marlin so it can still “talk” with the screen.
Yes, the TriGorilla boards aren’t powerhouses and don’t have enough “oomph” for the newest fancy features like input shaping, but they work. I’ve updated my printer to a community-made Marlin 1.1.9 release, and it works fine in conjunction with an OctoPrint Raspi.
Yeah I figured the screen was just tx ing M commands to marlin, same as most I suppose.
Can you link to which firmware you’re using? There are so many floating around. I do plan on setting up an ESP3D like all my other printers to link my octoprint server, it’s running ~6 containers for each printer communicating via wifi and ESP3D.
Thanks for the hope!
Cheers Henry
