 It's time to upgrade the firmware on the Creality CR6SE. Today I'm going to be using the community firmware and it's pretty awesome. My name's Jim and this is the Edge of Tech. So like I said, today we're going to be upgrading the firmware on the Creality CR6SE. Now, there's a guy out there by the name of Sebastian and him and a bunch of other community members have been putting a ton of time into making a great firmware for the CR6SE. They've been doing an awesome job. As a matter of fact, you can find their names right here somewhere. You guys rock. Now, I've been watching the firmware for a little while and a friend of mine has been testing the new year's release. I believe it was called and that's the one I'm going to use today. Wait, future Jim here, as I got done with this, as you'll hear later, I was talking to Sebastian and he said there was a brand new version, but I had already filmed this video and I got to the end of it. So I'm going to let this video go showing you how to flash version five, but version six is coming. The links will be in the description below and it works just the same. The flash is all the same. I'm running version six right now so far. So good. I hope it continues that way, but I just wanted to give you a heads up that there is new versions always being developed for this. And just when I got done filming with version five, they told me version six was going to be coming. So I wanted to make sure you guys knew that. All right, now back to the video. So today, what we're going to do is grab that firmware. We're going to walk through step by step on how to upgrade this and upgrade the screen on the CR6SE. When we're done, this thing is going to be working better than ever. So why would we want to do this? Well, there's many reasons. The community has been putting a ton of time into this to make a better user interface, make the printer more safe, to make SD cards support better, to make octoprint better. Overall, the firmware we're putting on today should blow the factory firmware out of the water. Trust me, you want to do this if you're running a factory firmware. It's not that hard to do, but I think we should get to it. The first thing we need to do is figure out what board we have in our printer. It could either be the 4.5.2 board or the 4.5.3 board. But we need to figure that out now. So let's do it. So in order to figure out which board we have in our CR6SE, there's actually a couple of different ways you can do it. The first way being you could take the panel off and look at the board directly. There is a little stamp on it that will say V4.5.2 or V4.5.3. Matter of fact, I'll put a graphic right here to show you what the board would look like and where to find that. The second way to do this is to look at the control panel itself when you turn it on and figure out which version of the firmware you have. Now this only works if you're using the stock firmware. And if you're using the stock firmware and you look and you have version 1.0.3.7 or version 1.0.2, you have the version 4.5.2 motherboard. And that's the firmware we're going to use today. If you have version 1.4 firmware or higher, then you'll have the version 4.5.3 board. Now in my case, I've looked and I have the version 4.5.2 motherboard. So that was two different ways you could find the firmware, either look at the board directly or look at what stock firmware or factory firmware your printer has on it. Again, it only works that way if you have the stock firmware still. If you've already changed your firmware, it probably isn't going to work like that because your firmware versions will be different. The last way and kind of the more difficult way you can figure out which firmware you have is to look at the serial number if you still have it on the front of your printer. And you can go through the numbers or the date code and figure out if it's before December 2020, then you'll have the 4.5.2 board. If it's after that point, then you'll have the 4.5.3 board. Personally, if you have the stock firmware, I just like looking at the control panel. It's the easiest way to go. If you want to be 100% sure, you might as well look at your main board and double check. Now that we know what firmware we need, in my case, I have a 4.5.2 board. Let's go get that firmware and get it installed. So the first thing we need to do is go to the GitHub for this firmware. In this case, I'll put the link in the description below. So once you're on the page, it'll see CR6 Community Firmware Release. In this case, Release 5 Beta, the Happy New Year edition. Now it could be a different version in the future and it will be, but for this video right here, this is what version we're going to use. First of all, if you look, it has a great table of contents. Here's your special thanks to everybody. We showed this at the beginning of the video as well, but thank you to everybody in the community who's been contributing to this and Sebastian for rocking this out too. Basically, this gives you everything we're going to go through. It shows you a different user interface. It tells you all the different things, but what we're going to do today is scroll down so we can find the file so we can get right to it. So scroll almost all the way down and you'll notice there's a bunch of different files here. In our case, we want the CR6 4.5.2, which is this one right here. If you have a 4.5.3, it's right here. And if you have a Max, it's right there. I'm going to go with the 4.5.2. So I'm just going to click that and it'll start the download. After that download starts, it'll go to your downloads folder here. You want to right click it if you're on Windows and extract that folder. If you're not on Windows, you'll have to do this a different way. Like on a Mac, you'll have to extract it as well. But either way, you want to extract the folder so this is what you see. Once we get this far, we can do a couple things. We can start with the firmware and we can go with the touchscreen. It does not matter which one you do first. All it matters is both of them get done. So right away, I'm going to right click and extract the touchscreen files out. I'm just going to do it right into this folder, just like that. And this will bring up the touchscreen folder with the files on it. Now, this is very important. Read these instructions. Obviously, I'm going to show you on my side how to do it. But there's a couple things we need to look for when we're flashing this. And it doesn't always work. Sometimes we need to do it two or three times before everything works. And we're going to go through that today. But this is the folder we're going to need for the touchscreen. And it'll say CR6 touchscreen. And this is the folder we're going to need for the regular firmware. We're going to grab our SD card. We're going to put it in the computer. And we're going to load the firmware onto it. Let's do that now. So I just used the SD card that came with the machine to do the firmware on the main board. Now once you get that put in, you're going to open it up and you'll probably find a bunch of stuff, especially if you've been printing for a while. Now I highly suggest copying all this stuff off because we're going to need a perfectly clean SD card. So I'm going to right click. I'm going to hit cut. I'm going to click the desktop thing. I'm going to click new. I'm going to do a folder. And it's going to be called CR6SE SD card. So I know what I'm talking about. We'll hit enter a couple of times. And now I'm in desktop CR6SD card. Now you can save this anywhere you want. You don't have to save it in this location. But then just paste it over. I used control V. You can right click and hit paste as well. It won't take that long. And it'll copy all the stuff off of our SD card and onto a folder just in case you ever need that again. So once everything is copied to the new location, I'm going to go back to drive F. That's what the SD card was called. And now it is perfectly clean. There's nothing on it. That's what we need. So what we need to do next is actually go back to our firmware folder that we opened. And we're going to find this firmware.bin file. I'm going to right click it. I'm going to hit copy. I'm going to go back to drive F, which was empty. Right click and just hit paste right on the root of that drive. Once that's pasted in, it only takes a second. I'm going to go to F, right click and eject that drive. Just like that. So the next thing we need to do is get our SD card ready for the screen. And this is a little more of a pain in the butt. You need a micro SD card. So one of the little guys like that. And we need to copy everything off of it if you need, if you want to. And we also need to format this in a specific way to make it work with the screen. So I'm going to pop this in real quick and then we're going to do that now. Okay. So once I got the micro SD put in, you see it popped up and I use this one quite a bit. But we need to get everything off of this one as well. So I'm going to highlight everything. In my case, I'm going to hit control A and then right click and then do a cut. I'm going to go back to the same. Desktop and I'm going to do micro SD card stuff. So I'm going to open that up and we're just going to paste it in there. This one shouldn't take long either. There was a bunch of prints that I've done in the past on here. So I kind of want to save them. You don't have to do this part, but I would suggest copying off if you ever want to print that again. So in the folder with a touch screen firmware, we need to go open this read me text. So when you open this, it has a ton of information and it's very helpful. It's kind of a pain in the butt to do this part. So hopefully we get it right. The first time, if not, we're going to keep doing it till we do. But it also says a couple pre-rex. We need a micro SD card of 16 gigabytes or less. It needs to be SD or SDHC. It needs to be formatted at fat 32. And it only can have a cluster size of 4096 right here. It cannot be an SDXC card. And we want to make sure it's formatted 100% correct. So I'm going to go back to drive F. It should be empty. Now I'm going to do a format. So I'm going to right click. I'm going to go up here to format. Remember, this is absolutely going to delete everything on that. So you want to be careful there. So allocation size 4096 bytes. Fat 32. You can label it if you want to and I'm going to do a quick format. But this is very important that we use fat 32. And it has to be 4096 bytes. We'll hit start. It says warning. It's going to format everything. It's going to erase all. Okay, go for it. It should only take a second and it's going to be done. And now that format is done. We can hit close. So if you have issues with this part, refer to this text file. It's going to go through everything we need to go through. Once we have it ready, all we need to do is drop that dwin underscore set folder, the whole folder, right to the SD card. So that the folder itself is present on the SD card. So this folder right here, not the contents like this, but the folder. So I'm going to right click this. I'm going to hit copy. I'm going to go to my F drive, which is my little USB. I'm sorry, which is my little micro SD card and I'm going to hit paste. That only takes a second. And that whole folder is on the root of our SD card now. Now we want to eject that. So eject or unmount if you have a Mac. And once that's done, now we go to the printer. All right, so we have both of our SD cards now, the one for the printer and the one for the screen. Now what we need to do is start with the screen. You can start in any order you want, but I'm going to start with the screen. So in my case, I'm just going to take it off. Yours could connect differently than mine. I know I've seen some videos where I think they may have changed this. But in this case, this is how mine comes off. It just an Allen wrench to the front here. And that comes off like that. And again, yours could mount a little bit different than this. I'm going to flip this over and pull the cord out like that. I'm going to take these four screws out, which is pretty quick and easy. So one, two, three, four. I'm going to lift the back of the screen off like this. And on the back of my screen, this is where my SD card is. And it goes up into here. Yours might be slightly different on the different production models. But in my case, I believe that the SD card goes straight up like this. And it'll slide right into that slot. So I'm going to try that. I'm going to set it right here carefully. I'm going to push it in and it's snapped in. Perfect. Now, if I bring this closer, you can see the SD cards in the slot right here. Now, what we need to do is plug in the screen like this. And I'm going to hold it here and just turn the printer on. Once the printer comes on, it's going to go through the firmware upgrade right here. And it's going to say SD card in progress. And it's going to download a bunch of files. This could take a couple minutes. So I'm going to let this go. And in the end, I'll show you what it should look like. Now we're done. And I can see at the top, it says end here. So that means it's done. And there's files in this area. So we have a one, a three, a three, a zero, one, a five, and then zeros here. But I know that some files were actually copied. That means, according to the screenshots in the folder we got, that means this was successful. It does say up here what version it is. And it also says to do this two or three times. So I'm actually going to do this a couple times. And then I'll be right back. But make sure it says end and make sure you have any files. If this is all zeros right here, then it did not work. You want to try it a couple more times. If that didn't work, reformat your card and try it again. But in this case, we do have some numbers. That's a good thing. Now I'm going to pull the cord back out because we know it worked. I'm going to take my SD card out of here because it doesn't need to stay in there. So I took the SD card out. I took the power cord out. I'm going to set my back cover back on. I'm going to screw the back cover on with those four bolts we took this out with. And then I'm going to put the screen back on the printer. And then we'll be done with the screen firmware upgrade. So that only took a few minutes to take it off and flash it and then go again. So then I'm going to plug this back in like that. And then I'm going to take my bolts, take my screws here, and get that screwed back onto the front of the machine. And I'll be right back. Okay, now that the screen is done, we're ready to upgrade the firmware on the printer. I have my card here. It's formatted and the bin or the firmware files on it. This is the second or third time I've tried. It has not worked. So I've actually tried using a couple of different cards here so far. And in this one, I actually changed the name of the firmware. We're going to see if I can get it to work that way. So I'm going to plug this in. So it's plugged in there. I'm going to turn the printer on and hopefully we can get a firmware upgrade here. Hey, hey, it worked. So what I had to do there was change the name of the file to just firmware one. And I'll show you that on the computer here in a second. But it actually worked. To verify that it worked, let's go check it out here. It does show me everything with a new screen up at the top. It says, Creality Community Firmware. And I think it looks awesome. But it says it's ready. Let's go to Control. Let's go to Info. We have a firmware right here, which is a Creality Community Firmware CR6 Release 5 right there, which is awesome. And it tells you the website to go to. The screen looks like it's working. And it is pretty awesome. I really like the new interface. As you can see here, it really changes it up. You have a print option here. There's nothing in there right now. You can prepare it so we can heat everything up. Something you might want to do is just make sure everything moves OK. Let's just do a forward and a back here. Yep, that works fine. If we do right and left, our hot end is moving. And if I go up and down, my gantry is going up and down. So that's awesome. Just verify all those are correct. Once we have it like this, it says we need to go reset defaults. So let's go to Control here. Let's go Restore Factory Settings. And it'll restore everything just like that. Just so you know when you do that, if you had any special configs, it will get rid of that. So save those off if you need to. But again, that's just Control. Restore Factory Settings. It'll beep and you're done. That's pretty awesome. The next thing we need to do is level it. So I'm going to pull the camera back. We're going to level this thing and see how it does. So it heated everything up and now it's going to go probe. So now it's going to go ahead. It heated up and it's going to go through a new probing sequence. If we look at the screen here, it looks like it's going to probe similar to like an M. So it's going to go up, over, down, over, up, over, down. So I'm going to let it go through its thing here. We're going to drop a quick time lapse in and we'll be right back when it's done probing. So we're at the very last point here. And as you can see, all of these are white now, which means it hits all those points on the bed. It's really cool. So they're hollow and then when it hits each one, they kind of light up to let you know that it hit those points on the bed. And it also does the leveling at 50C on the bed and 120C on the nozzle, which I really think is cool. There is a Z offset button. I have not adjusted that yet because we haven't had to. I haven't printed anything, but that is pretty cool. So we're just doing a quick homing. There we go. So once the leveling part of this is done, all we need to do is test. So the next thing we're going to do is maybe throw a test on there. But in general, the firmware is now installed. We went through the new leveling process. We got that dialed in. And now if we go back, it's really cool new interface. And there's a lot of really cool features. So I just wanted to show you something real quick. I was talking on Discord about the issue I was having flashing the firmware, which I ended up needing to rename the firmware file. So it worked. When I jumped in here, they said, hey, wait, we have a brand new version coming. The one you're doing is going to be outdated soon. So use this one. So if you notice here, I redid this real quick. And I'm using CR6 Community Firmware, release six pre three ready. So I flash the screen again. I flashed the firmware again. And now we have the brand new firmware. And it's released six. It says pre three on my screen here. So what that's going to do is give us the ability and the possibility to override retractions of the slicer, which will be pretty cool if you want to do maybe a retraction test or something. You'll be able to come in and actually override the retractions right on the screen, which can be pretty cool. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to go through the control, restore factory defaults again. I'm going to go through another level. I'm going to let it heat up, run through another leveling, and then we're going to get a print going. So that's it. We've successfully added the new firmware to our CR6 SE. And that community firmware is really cool. As I was having an issue with the firmware, that I ended up fixing by changing the firmware file on the SD card. So I just right clicked, I renamed it to firmware one.bin, put it back in and it worked fine as we saw in the video there. But as I was doing that, I was talking on Discord to Sebastian and he said, hang on, your video is going to be outdated pretty quick because we have a new version coming. So he gave me the link to the new version, which is release six. And I threw it on here real quick. And I just showed that right before we cut to this shot. But it went on the same way. It went on very easy. It is a screen and a board update. So everything will be the same as you saw here with the exception of that you'll use the version six, not the version five we were just using. So all of that being said, I think this went on pretty quick and easy. It took about maybe 10, 15 minutes because we had a couple of issues. The longest part is actually taking that screen off and putting it back on. And then the factory reset and the leveling at the end. You want to make sure you do that. I'm going to do a few prints and see how it's going now. I'll throw those out on social media just to make sure everything prints good. But for this video on how to upgrade the firmware on the CR6SE, that's it. This video probably took longer to film than the actual process takes, but that's okay. I did it a couple of times with that new firmware version. But I really appreciate the community for jumping in on this. Sebastian and everyone else who has a part in this as we saw in the beginning of the video with the credits there. I really hope it makes my CR6SE much better. I hope you guys learned something today and as always, keep printing. Hey, everybody. I hope you liked the video. If you did, give me that thumbs up, hit that subscribe button right here and the bell if you want to get notified anytime we go live on our Monday night show called Hot Makes or anytime you want to get notified when a new video comes out like this one. You guys rock.