I have played with flash print as well, I find it doesn’t do a very good job of printing g and have played with many settings to try and improve. The biggest issue I have with it is with when it move to start the next layer it doesn’t extrude for the first 2-5mm and just has a bit of filament come out. Then when it fi idles the exterior and moves to the infill it leaves extra filament which results in a very bad seam. Of all I have tried replicator g has worked the best. Slic3r is very good as well for the most part. Would love to buy Simplify 3d but it’s over 200 cad. I’m new to this so I keep watch in video to learn more.
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The firmware on the link is for v7. 2 the printer came with 7.8. I believe the manual said not to try and upgrade as it might cause issues. I have tried flash print but haven’t gotten the best results yet. I am also using octoprint with Slic3r and love it. No more moving the SD card back and forth and I can watch e what is happening on my phone
Are you on the latest version of Flashprint? It has worked decent for me.
You can try upgrading and/or modifying the firmware, but one thing you’ll definitely want to do first is make an exact backup of both the flash and eeprom data for your existing setup. That way, if the upgrade goes bad (which it easily could), then you can always flash the original firmware and eeprom back in and be right back to where you started. So many people don’t do that and then no longer have the original flash copy to return to and end up with either a non-functioning or poorly functioning printer as a result.
Just use ‘avrdude’ to copy it (Google it if you aren’t familiar with ‘avrdude’ – it comes with the Arduino IDE and/or on Linux you can install it via ‘sudo apt-get install avrdude’). I used the following two lines to read mine. The first one reads and saves the flash and the second the eeprom:
avrdude -p m2560 -P /dev/ttyACM1 -c stk500v2 -b 57600 -U flash:r:FlashForge_flash_orig.hex:i
avrdude -p m2560 -P /dev/ttyACM1 -c stk500v2 -b 57600 -U eeprom:r:FlashForge_eeprom_orig.hex:i
The arguments are case-sensitive. You can probably get by without the baud rate specifier (the “-b 57600”) or the protocol specifier (the “-c stk500v2”) since ‘avrdude’ should get those from the avrdude.conf file from the “m2560” processor specifier, but it never hurts to explicitly list those.
And also, this is on Linux. On Windows and/or Mac, you’ll need to change the /dev/ttyACM1 to the correct USB device name for your printer’s connection. Windows it’s probably a COM port number specifier. On Mac it will probably be something like /dev/cu.usbmodem1A21 or /dev/tty.usbserial-A6004byf, etc… And even on Linux it could be something different, like /dev/ttyACM0 or /dev/ttyUSB0, etc. It should be the same USB port path you use to communicate with the printer via USB.
This will give you two files, FlashForge_flash_orig.hex and FlashForge_eeprom_orig.hex with your original flash and eeprom images, respectively. Then if your firmware upgrade goes wrong and kills your printer, you can repeat the above commands but change the ‘r’ on the -U option to ‘w’ for write and reflash the files back into the printer, which will work as long as you don’t somehow destroy the bootloader in your printer’s M2560 processor in the process of updating your firmware. The bootloader should be locked to make it difficult to accidentally delete (assuming FlashForge properly set the lock bits when they initially programmed things).
Worst case if you do stomp on the bootloader is you’ll have to get an ISP (in-system-programming) cable and connect directly to the ISP port of the processor (the 6-pin header connector near the center of the MightyBoard between where the two crystals (metal cans) can be seen. There’s two ISP connectors, one for the M2560 and one for the 8u2/16u2 processor – be sure to attach to the correct one). And then you can manually reflash the processor without a bootloader. But chances are low that you would accidentally stomp on the bootloader.
But yeah, if you don’t save a copy of the flash and eeprom, then yes, I agree with your quote from the manual – “don’t try and upgrade as it might cause issues” (of which you can’t recover without the original firmware copy – and it’s hard to find an original firmware image if you didn’t save it off yourself).
And you mention OctoPrint. I’m using OctoPrint too and on a Raspberry Pi (OctoPi). In fact, I ran the above ‘avrdude’ commands above on the Raspberry Pi itself to save off the printer’s firmware. You can do the firmware saving with any “computer” – whether it’s your desktop/laptop or a Raspberry Pi or something.
I have not tried Flashprint lately but I could probably on Friday - maybe sooner. If you want to find a STL to try I can get it also and see how it goes. I know my FFCP’s run great with S3D so they should be in good shape to run Flashprint. We can compare results with similar setting etc.