Solving firmware upload problems on GT2560

Problems changing or updating your firmware on a GT2560? There's a lot of nonsense concerning a knockoff GeeeTech board on cheap Prusa i3's. This solution may might help.

Earlier this year I was working out of town, so I purchased a knock-off version of the GeeeTech Prusa i3 3D printer kit. This gave me something to play with while I was there, but unfortunately not for long. The laser cut wood frame did not hold up well in a suitcase traveling through the airport system. Several areas broke.

I decided to use the GT2560 motherboard to upgrade my Prusa Mendel I built about 8 years ago.

Everything worked smoothly, but there was an issue with my stepper motors. Messy wiring has always been an irritation for me, so I was excited to be able to utilize the cable connectors on the stepper motors with the pre-configured cables that came with the Prusa i3 kit. But this would not work. The lead outs on my stepper motors are different than the lead outs on the kit's stepper motors.

My stepper motors on the Prusa Mendel are Minebea, a Japanese manufactured stepper motor with a good solid reputation. The stepper motors that came with the kit are slightly larger, but manufactured by RBstep motor. A generic Chinese manufactured product.

I decided to swap out my Minebea steppers with the generic ones so that I could keep the clean install of wiring.

 All of this is fine, but the GT2560 motherboard needs an updated firmware for the physical changes that I have made by the swapout. This is where the trouble lies. As I noted in my last blog entry, I could not seem to make any firmware changes. The board was not uploading.

After a lot of research I discovered that this is a very common problem with this particular board and specifically with the knockoff versions of the GeeeTech printer. The upload will just stall and eventually give a timeout error. Fortunately the fix is easy.

To keep it precise, here are the following specs of my system:

I'm using Windows 7 with the latest version of the FT232RQ driver. This driver creates a USB port for the GT2560 otherwise the device will not show up in your device list and thus be inoperable. (Note: Windows 7 requires a manual install of this driver... Windows 10 will install the driver automatically when the GT2560 is plugged into the USB port.)

Next, I'm using an older version of Arduino software. The version is 1.5.2. It's recommended to use an older version of Arduino to upload the Marlin firmware that the GT2560 requires.

Once you have your Arduino software set up, navigate into the folder system. In my case, it was:

Arduino-1.5.2 folder
then
hardware folder
then
arduino folder
then
avr folder
then open the text file boards in a text editing program such as WordPad.

Here you will find a list of declarations for many different Arduino boards. Scroll to the bottom and add the following lines:

## GT2560 w/ ATmega2560 mega.menu.cpu.gt2560atmega2560=GT2560 w/ ATmega2560 mega.menu.cpu.gt2560atmega2560.upload.protocol=wiring mega.menu.cpu.gt2560atmega2560.upload.maximum_size=253952 mega.menu.cpu.gt2560atmega2560.upload.speed=57600 mega.menu.cpu.gt2560atmega2560.bootloader.high_fuses=0xD8 mega.menu.cpu.gt2560atmega2560.bootloader.extended_fuses=0xFD mega.menu.cpu.gt2560atmega2560.bootloader.file=stk500v2/stk500boot_v2_mega2560.hex mega.menu.cpu.gt2560atmega2560.build.mcu=atmega2560 mega.menu.cpu.gt2560atmega2560.build.board=AVR_MEGA2560

Save this to the text file and close.

Now open your Arduino 1.5.2 program and change your board selection to the entry
Arduino Mega (ATmega1280).

This is it. Simple and effective. The GT2560 will now upload whatever you choose . In my case, I'm using the file I3_pro_X firmware setup supplied by the GeeeTech website for the Prusa i3. This is similar to a Mendel Prusa configuration and will make a good base setup.