ADVi3++ a Custom Marlin Firmware for Wanhao i3 Plus Printers

Introduction

ADVi3++ is a fork of the Marlin Firmware for the Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus (and its clones: Monoprice Maker Select Plus, Cocoon Create). It includes both Marlin itself and customizations of the LCD screens.

Objectives

The objectives with this custom version (when compared with Wanhao stock firmwares) are the following:

Based on the latest version of Marlin available (currently: 1.1.8)
As few modifications of the Marlin code as possible. The goal is to be able to port ADVi3++ to new versions of Marlin with only a few effort.
Fully open source code. Unfortunately, even if it is required by the GPL, Wanhao has not released the source code of their latest Marlin-based firmwares.
Object-oriented code with as few hard-coded values as possible. For example, instead of constructing a frame by hand, use instances of classes that know how to construct themselves.
Documented code, logging and error handling (without using exceptions as they are not supported).
Full colors and nice LCD screens including temperature graphs.
Icons and pictures recreated from scratch.
About screen with the various versions (LCD, Mainboard, ...) and integrity check.
Etc.

ADVi3++ User Manual

A complete and up to date User Manual is published on GitHub Pages. This manual contains:

a list of features
How to Flash the firmware
LCD Touch Screen Manual
Default Configuration used by ADVi3++
Resources

This manual is also available as a standalone PDF file.

Sister project

ADVi3++ is split into two sister projects:

ADVi3pp-Mainboard: this project, a fork of Marlin firmware
ADVi3pp-LCD: the LCD resources

I have also published an article "Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus 3D Printer - Everything I know about the Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus 3D printer and its clones".

Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus

LCD display

The LCD panel is manufactured by AMP Display Inc. and uses DGUS (DWIN Graphic User System) developed by DWIN Technologies. The reference of the LCD panel is DMT48270M043_05W and you can find its datasheet under "Resources" below.

It is build around the proprietary K600+ kernel and simplifies the development of user interfaces: the different screens are defined by a set of files (images, fonts, etc) stored in the flash memory of the panel and they can be customized using a graphical editor (part of DGUS SDK).

The LDC panel has thus two distinct software components:

A firmware, made by DWIN Technologies.
A set of resources, made by the manufacturer of the 3D printer (Wanhao, Monoprice, Cocoon) or yourself. This component is often called "LCD firmware" even if it is wrong.

LCD firmware

WARNING: Do not make the confusion between the actual LCD firmware (made by DWIN Technologies) and the LCD resources for the customization of the display (next paragraph).

LCD resources

The images have the following format:

BMP (Windows 3.x Bitmap)
480 x 272
24 bits per pixel (3 x 8 bits, no alpha)
Bottom-up bitmap

The last point is very important. The LCD (i.e. DGUS) is not able to handle other formats like top-down bitmaps. To convert images to the righr format, you can use ImageMagick convert:

convert 180.bmp -resize 480x272 BMP3:180.bmp

To convert all images:

for f in *.bmp; do convert "$f" -resize 480x272 BMP3:"$f"; done

Resources

Note: In the past, it was possible to download these resources directory from the dwin.com.cn website. It is no more the case (you get plenty of errors) so I copy them into this repository.

Other projects

There are some other projects (I am aware of) on a similar topic:

i3plus+ from Leo Lüker (Silverquark): a modified version of the Marlin 1.1.2 firmware for the WANHAO Duplicator i3 Plus 3d printer. Important: No more actively developed (that's why I created ADVi3++).
i3extra from Nemcsik Péter: a modified version of the Marlin 1.1.0-RC8 firmware and updated LCD resources. Important: this project is no more maintained.
Wanhao-I3-Plus by James Armstrong: Sources of version 2.18 of Mainboard firmware and LCD resources.
Wanhao-I3-Plus by WANHAO 3D PRINTER: Official sources of version 2.1.803 of Mainboard firmware and LCD resources.
Original Wanhao i3 Plus Firmware version 3.0 As far as I know, Wanhao has not yet released the source of version 3.0 (even if it is required under GPL). I have ask them when they plan to release the sources. I am waiting...

Thanks

Thank you to Leo Lüker (Silverquark) for his i3plus+ project. I take many ideas from his code. But the project is not very active (still in Beta) and I do not like the screen (personal taste) so I have created the ADVi3++ fork (technically, it is a fork of Marlin, not of i3plus+).

Thank to Marlin for their great work.

Copyright

Based on Sprinter and grbl.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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