The new TFT’s have a new chip in the, which means the firmware is slightly different. It would use the “GD” bin instead of the regular. I feel that is going to cause lots of issues down the road.
The TFT is already a little over a third the cost of the bundle, and the touch side has always been a pain in the butt.
Two obvious options, the old LCD…not being produced by big tree tech any longer. And the new raspberry pi w2 is not in stock anywhere.
Official V1 support for GRBL HAL on SKR Pro would be awesome ;), indeed it would imply to left TFT screen over.
Using only Laser with LightBurn from now, i realise i never used the screen at all yet or maybe once at beginning for jogging but wasn’t practical in my setup.
The esp-01 wifi dongle would be pretty cheap and add a lot of functionality. But it requires wifi and networking (a little anyway).
There are really two camps, the people who want something with zero technology and ones that want all the technology.
Maybe the old screen as an option (they are still made elsewhere, right)? And the wifi dongle?
I haven’t looked too closely at the esp wifi interface, except using it on the fluidNC. I assume you could buy a box of those esp-01s in the right form factor, flash them quickly and then sell them for $10-20 a pop. The real cost is flashing, maintaining the firmware, and support. The chips are nearly free.
The old screen is still bulletproof. We might have to mess with the timings a little for the skr boards to work with the old screen instead of Marlin mode.
I love the wifi, but much prefer having an interface at the machine to run the SD card jobs.
The ESP01/8266 parts are cheap, but annoying to one-of program. It has a lot of promise, though. If you can find a good firmware, it’s worth including. Once you have a base firmware down and with the 8 pin programming header, they should be able to be mass programmed easily enough.
I use the terminal mode on the touchscreen often on the Repeat. Pretty sure I would on other machines. So that screen is nice to have
Yeah, with BTT not making them any more we end up with very questionable quality (thinks bad ramps). I can ask them again and try to entice them with a substantially larger order. The price difference is a little more than 4x less.
I was just thinking if no matter what we need to introduce a complication, we might as well do so with a the benefit of it being less expensive.
Shoot I was under the impression the wifi dongle could be a hotspot? So I could flash them and they would not need to be messed with after the fact.
Most people really do not want to bring a computer in the shop, tablets and phones are a bit different. USB is not really an option for LowRiders either.
Are there any other screens out there that would work with the Rambo and SKR?
The other option is any one of the other BTT screens. The TFT35 is the most expensive because of Marlin mode. Switching screens would be far easier than having two types of screen I think…and it would save money still.
Did you see my suggestion about the mks TFT screens? I am not sure if they offer anything over another BTT screen. But worth looking at.
If we do the esp01, we probably want the SD card on the skr enabled in Marlin, which breaks the Marlin mode. Hmmm. That might be pretty cool. I wonder if that is more reliable than using the sd from the touch screen mode, because Marlin is still in charge. I also remember copying to sd over serial as being painfully slow. Maybe it won’t matter with our tiny CNC gcode.
Oh those MKS are different. I thought they were just knocks offs. I need to get my hands on one. I know some have used the BTT firmware on a mks, but the mks looks to also have it’s own firmware. I still think a basic Marlin mode screen is best though,
I was just getting my stuff ready to flash the esps I have to try them out. (remember awhile back I had to buy a new programmer…I found the other one two days ago! Perfect timing ahahahahaha)
It is super slow, but you can still physically use the card to transfer. Although now thinking about it, if you leave the card in the SKR Pro it eventually messes things up, or it did for a while there, I have not tested it in a while.
Just kinda freaking out. I hope there is a new LR on the near horizon and I am going to be out of boards, and screens are going to be an issue as well. Trying to use this anxiety energy to make some changes that most will like.
I have a MKS TFT24 v1.1 working with an SKR 1.3. The wifi module works. There is a guy that has done a bit of work on the browser interface here. At the bottom of his page there are downloadable bin files for both the MKSwifi.bin and the MKSwifiWebView.bin. This provides a web page from which you can control the printer and upload files to the sd card. (It takes about 10 seconds per Kb).
The wifi module is auto programmed if the MKSwifi.bin file is placed on the sd card and the display reset. You can configure your wifi credentials in the mks_config.txt file.
Well BTT says If I 10X my 12864lcd order they will make me more. That means sea freight, Lots of extra time involved. I need at least 2000 extra charge, they would prefer 5k-10k though. No real answers on their other screens yet.
I have the esp, but never use it. 90% of the time I sneakernet a sd card and control it with the tft. I never use marlin mode on the screen (that’s the mode that looks like the old school dot matrix prusa i3 screen I presume, might as well just buy one of those if so, but they’re kind of pricy too IIRC)