The Knomi V2, and why I don't like BTT

I am currently amidst working on my my new Voron Trident, built from a kit from Siboor (review on this specifically at a later date perhaps but the short answer is I generally will not recommend them).

One of the few upgrades I did to the Voron was to add the BIGTREETECH Knomi V2 to the stealth burner tool-head. In case you do not know, this device is a small silly screen added to the printer. Its a cute customization, but serves little functional purpose.

The V2 improves on the V1 by making the screen a touchscreen. However, in the end of the day, the Knomi is essentially an ESP with a small screen that connects to Moonraker via WiFi to show the print status of your printer.

Now, as it is purely an aesthetic addition, hopefully you can customize this screen to have it serve your liking, right?

Well yes, and BTT (BIGTREETECH) happily advertises it as such on their wiki!

So, that's fine, right? Yes, the procedure to change the image involves compiling the firmware with your images yourself, which may be a bit advanced for newbies and all, but given we are dealing with Vorons here that's fair, right?

Unfortunately, BTT seems to be one those companies that misunderstands "Open Source" as "Fix our broken product yourself." To get to the point, the instructions for actually flashing the firmware to the Knomi V2 have never actually been updated from the V1, and thus are incorrect. At time of writing, it still states that the firmware upload tool requires the bootloader.bin to have the offset 0x1000. This is incorrect for the V2, for the V2 you actually need an offset of 0x0000.

And I didn't discover this on the clear web via google searches, I had to actually end up joining the BTT discord, and there thankfully some kind people let me know what was going on (No staff though).

After a bit, we also figured out that the firmware given still doesn't compile, even with the correct offset due to dependency changes. Thankfully someone found a solution to fix the used dependencies to older known working versions, and we were off to the races. And better yet, this was posted on some Github issues of BTT, so technically you can find breadcrumbs on the open web now.

I compiled the steps into an updated text guide here.

And yet, as of time of writing, BTT has still yet to update any of their official documentation, which undoubtedly is leading to tons of people breaking their firmware.

In the end, would I recommend this novelty screen? Honestly probably not. It was way too expensive to be maintained poorly like this, and even now that is technically working, I still get common dropouts from the device causing it to randomly not work as advertised.

This is by no means the first time I had issues with BTT. I purchased several of their SKR 1.4 printer boards, nearly all of which failed within a year. Their 5 inch HDMI touchscreen for the printer does not have a dynamic backlight, meaning the screen is always on even if it is receiving no input. I have had nothing but issues with BTT and they were always answered with "well if you just do this hacky hack, you can maybe just get it to hobble along!"

It's no surprise that Bambulabs was able to come in and wreck the entire 3D printing industry, it had gotten too complacent. As much as I don't like the Apple way of doing things, in the end they succeeded because they actually made things just work rather than requiring 200 dollars worth of mods; a-la the Creality approach.

In the end though, I don't think any Bambu print head can look like this

Perhaps the pain was worth it.

Stepping back a bit, I don't want to say the dependency issue itself was BTTs fault, any Javascript dev themselves knows the pain of dependencies changing ruining your work. However, its been weeks now, They still have yet to update their documentation about this issue (or push an update on the firmware files), nor have they fixed their documentation for the Knomi V2 in general. That much isn't acceptable, and we should hold these companies to a higher standard.

You can find the firmware I compiled with the above theme here