Development Update – AnyCubic Chiron

8/8/21 Update:

We have the firmware 99% of the way completed and are working on the documentation and videos for the LCD changeover. We have a placeholder “product” in the shop already setup that you can add to your wishlist to be notified when we are ready to put out the LCD kits. You can see that here: AnyCubic Chiron LCD Upgrade Kit – TH3D Studio LLC

Firmware & Upgrade Support

The Chiron is a unique machine set up in that they used a board they already had and made an adapter PCB to route wires for endstops and the touch LCD. Like many Touch LCD models, this one also runs limited firmware and there are no sources available for it. We’ve reverse-engineered the pinout for the adapter PCB they use in the machine and have mapped those out. Our plans are to release a guide on bypassing the adapter PCB with some simple, off-the-shelf male to female Dupont jumpers, an LCD conversion kit, and firmware for the machine when it’s using the conversion kit. We are also going to have EZABL support as well for this machine.

Upgrade Plan

Our plan is to make firmware in our Unified 2 for this machine for its stock board. We may add support for the stock LCD but the stock LCD will not allow us to get features like Babystepping (Live Z Adjust) on it. Converting the printer LCD (like other models who use these locked-down touch screens) to a 12864 will restore access to core firmware features.

Once we have firmware done we will make a video showing how to connect from the board to the plugs to bypass the breakout board. You can see our test machine picture below showing the jumpers. There are 2 main headers we need to bypass. One feeds another breakout board in the control box and then goes to the hotend. The other is for the bed thermistor. The SD slot in the bottom of the printer will no longer be used as the new LCD we’re going to use has its own SD slot.

We will also be designing an EZABL mount and doing an installation video for this machine as we’ll need to connect up the EZABL to a spare endstop pin on the board. This printer has dual Z endstops so we want to preserve that feature and use the EZABL to perform gantry leveling on it. This may add time for additional testing and development but we think it will be worth the wait. 🙂

ETA?

Since this machine will be using Unified 2, we have to complete our current in-progress code update to bring Unified 2 up from Marlin 2.0.7.2 codebase to a newer release (2.0.9 as of writing this). Once that is done (hopefully in a week), we can start adding new machines to Unified 2. We’d expect (pending no delays) that we should have the video guide out, LCD conversion kit done, and firmware done in about 3-4 weeks at most. Make sure to follow our social media pages or join our email list to be notified when we add support for the Chiron.

Breakout Board Pinouts

Here are our internal pics with notes on where the pins go. This PCB plugs into the EXP2 header of the stock board and some other headers near the EXP2 header.

Jumpering from Connectors to Board

Now that we have the pinouts reverse engineered, we can install Dupont jumper wires to bypass the PCB to free up the EXP1 and EXP2 headers on the stock board to allow us to connect a 12864 LCD to it. Here is how we did it on our machine. This page is NOT meant to be a guide, but more of a “here is where we are at on this printer” update.