Problem

My Ender 3 S1 seemed to not be able to boot. After switching it to ‘on’, the display just showed the Creality logo and no other progress seemed to take place.

Why did this happen?

Still absolutely no clue. No manual attempt to flash the printer has been made, just stopped working out of the blue.

Solution

ℹ️ Creality video on YT

Reflash the printer firmware. Steps I followed:

• Check the printer chipset version - it will either be STM32F1 or STM32F4. To do this you need to turn the printer upside down, take the bottom plate off and check the chipset. Step 1 from this article contains a picture of what this looks like. ℹ️ I am using STM32F4

• Download the appropriate firmware for the printer from Creality downloads page. I downloaded Ender-3S1_HWv24S1_301_SWV3.0.4_C_F401_FDM_LASER.

• Unzip the firmware zip and check the files inside:

.
├── STM32F4_UPDATE/
│   └── Ender-3S1_HWv24S1_301_SWV3.0.4_C_F401_FDM_LASER_0506.bin
├── STM32f401RCTx_Bootloader_v1.bin
├── Screen Firmware/
│   ├── TJC_SET
│   └── private
└── Readme.txt

Flashing the printer

Copy STM32F4_UPDATE to an SD card, and put it on the front SD slot of the printer (the one you normally use for printable files). Insert the card in the printer slot.

Flashing the screen

• Open the backplate of the screen, disconnect from power

• Get your microSD card, and format it to FAT32 with 8GB storage size, and allocation unit size 4096B. In MacOS I did it as follows:

sudo newfs_msdos -F 32 -c 16 -s 1953125 -v INTENSO /dev/disk4

• Command breakdown:

  • newfs_msdos -> create a new FAT partition
  • -F 32 -> Determines what type of FAT to create
  • -c 16 -> How many sectors per cluster - this is expressed in powers of 2, from 1 to 128.
  • -s 1953125 -> Size in sectors. One sector is usually 512KB, unless defined differently from the FS. 8GB in bytes is 1e+9, divided by 512 to provide enough sectors for 8GB of storage size
  • -v INTENSO -> Corresponds to the volume name of the existing mount

• Remove hidden TJC files. For some reason, the firmware zip includes some hidden files that present the following error message when I tried to flash them:

SD Card Update... The system detects multiple tft files, can not be upgraded, please remove the extra tft file

An example of the files:

aorfanos@workfs ~ % ls -lah /Volumes/INTENSO 
total 112
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 aorfanos  sre   8.0K May  9 19:28 .
drwxrwxrwx  1 aorfanos  sre   8.0K May  9 19:27 .Spotlight-V100
-rwxrwxrwx  1 aorfanos  sre   4.0K May  9 19:28 ._TJC_SET
-rwxrwxrwx  1 aorfanos  sre   4.0K May  9 19:28 ._private
drwxrwxrwx  1 aorfanos  sre   8.0K May  9 19:31 .fseventsd
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 aorfanos  sre   8.0K May  9 19:28 TJC_SET
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 aorfanos  sre   8.0K May  9 19:28 private

In the above example you need to remove ./._TJC_SET - Also, check the other directories in case other *TJC* files are present. In my case, I found another one under ./TJC_SET:

aorfanos@workfs ~ % ls -lah /Volumes/INTENSO/TJC_SET 
total 2032
drwxrwxrwx  1 aorfanos  staff   8.0K May  9 19:28 .
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 aorfanos  staff   8.0K May  9 19:35 ..
-rwxrwxrwx  1 aorfanos  staff   4.0K May  9 19:28 ._tjc.tft
-rwxrwxrwx@ 1 aorfanos  staff   989K Oct 14  2022 tjc.tft

Removing those files allowed for the update to take place.

• Remove the microSD card from screen

• Start the printer. Booting should be completed successfully.