Ok so I’ve managed to brick the controller on the Anet A8. And I got myself a device to un-brick it. I’ll just go to my Ebay and show you want I bought. I bought two. So I think it’s this one here. I bought this one here and it wasn’t particularly good. You can see it’s a ISP ASP programmer. Ok what I’m going to do is flash the original bootware on this, and the way you do that is by going to the IDE which comes with the firmware. The only problem is this one here doesn’t have the right settings in the board or the programme, so I’m going to open up Skynet V 2.3.2. I’ve got Arduino 1.8.0 – I open this up. You can see in the board section it says Anet V1.0 and the programmer is set to USBasp. Now what I can do with this, is plug the ASP in. You want to make sure you put the 6 pin connector in the right way around. Make sure you look at the diagram and the images on the trouble shooting section of the firmware. It’s very simple. You press Burn Bootloader and that’s the script there. The next thing you want to do is go to the documentation folder, firmware reset, and open the AVRdudess. Change that to USBasp, change the port to USB, the MCU’s going to change to ATmega1284p. You’re going to open firmwarwe with the auto-level (if you have a levelling sensor) and press go. And that should write that next file onto the. Ok so I’m back to the factory reset. That’s a relief. I can actually see some information now on the blue display panel, before all I had was two white lines. Ok so that’s how you unbrick the controller board on the Anet A8. Ok so I tried to update the firmware using the IDE that come in the folder with Skynet v 2.3.2 and I was getting some error messages. I copied them down. This is what they looked like. Essentially this was the error message which attempts to kind of place the firmware onto the controller wasn’t working. I don’t know if unbricking the device did something to some of the settings – I’m not fluent enough with this to identify. I made a load of changes to the configuration.h file on what I read and watch, and I figured out a way of getting around that problem by using ASP unbricking device that I bought. This time by creating a hex file. So you want to make sure you put a configuration file into the folder containing the skynet arduino files. I modified one myself and the gist of it is on screen now. Then what I did was created a hex file and to do that you press export compiled binary. And it dumps that in the folder with the rest of the firmware information that you’re sourcing from. So once that’s done I’ll show you. It’s compiled a sketch. Essentially what you do when you’re adjusting the configuration file, is you make a change, you save it. I was working on Notepad ++ and you go into arduino IDE and verify it and see if you get any error messages. And generally if you’ve missed a step or something is clashing, something will be flagged up with a message. So once that’s done you go to your skynet folder  and search for the hex file *.*hex. You can see two files have been created, one with the bootloader and one without. Now you go back to the documentation folder, you go to troubleshoot, troubleshoot again, firmware reset, and AVRdudess stock firmware hex, go to AVRdudess, and you open the AVRdudess application. You then change the USB to ASP – which was the thing I showed you on screen that I bought from Ebay. You change your port to USB, and you change the MCU to the type of arduino that’s on the Anet A8 which is an ATmega1284p. Then you go to flash and navigate to the skynet folder and I’m going to go with the one with the bootloader. Press ok, and then you press go. I noticed a few people had asked question about the same problem I was having and no-one seemed to answer them.

And the reason I got into this mess in the first place, was because I was trying to get a 3D touch probe to work on the Anet A8 using the Skynet Firmware. I can honestly say the world of 3D printers is very different to CNC routers. It’s very idiosyncratic and the software mirrors that. But the printer is back up and working, and the stock proximity sensor is also doing what it is meant to. I just need to decided what to do with the footage up to the moment I bricked the Anet. I don’t think I’m going to have another go at installing the 3D touch probe. Anway thanks for watching.