I’ve recently returned to the hobby, after some lifestyle changes brought on by the pandemic. It’s been a lot of fun catching up on the latest developments, like the emergence of Bambu, etc. My printer is an Ender 3 from Sainsmart, bought in late 2019. I’m guessing it’s one of the earliest hardware revisions. I printed a few of the suggested upgrades back when I first bought it, but it was printing pretty well out of the box, so I never did any real mods.
I couldn’t help but pick up some recent deals: I ordered the Ender 3 V3 SE, along with a Sprite Pro extruder and dual Z-axis kit - so I can still have a nice machine to print with while I upgrade and tune my old one.
So I wanted to ask the community a few things:
-
Am I likely to need a new motherboard to run this extruder? Hoping I can get away with just firmware
-
Same question, but for Klipper? I currently run Octopi, if I switch away from Marlin, will I also need to drop that as well?
-
Are there any other mods I should be considering to maximize the machine’s potential? I’d like to use what I have available where possible, just couldnt resist the Sprite Pro as I want to do ASA and TPU.
Would love to hear folks’ thoughts, seems like a better time than ever to be in the hobby!
Has there been so much going on in the market? I’m still using my Ender 3 and I’m not sure what I would add to it, it serves me well (I already added a BL Touch, in the early days I got it, and a glass bed, although I don’t see much benefit from that last part). It’s just doing the job perfectly. 🤷 That being said, I only use it for functional printing. I way more often use my Elegoo Saturn (a resin printer), as I use it to print my tabletop minis.
If you’re happy don’t feel like you need to change anything!
Here is my take. I have an Aquila (Ender 3 v2 clone). I really had to keep that thing tuned in order to get decent prints. I later bought a Prusa MK3S+ which I haven’t had to tune at all. I am bummed that the MK4 was released 4 months after I bought my MK3, but thats life.
With the evolution of printing, and the new advances, an ender 3 just cannot compete with quality or speed…unless you put in a lot of upgrades and time/energy. Its a workhorse, but only for those that want to work on it and tune it. There are so many new printers that are faster, more reliable, and have some incredible features like Bambulabs, Mk4, Anker Make, etc. Its really hard to recommend Ender 3s (any of them) anymore.
Are they still sold, anyway? I mean, sure, someone who has no printer should buy a more recent one. But that was not the subject, here : the question was if it was needed to replace an Ender 3. I certainly would not, personally, it would be throwing out a perfectly good printer for incremental upgrades. Of course, it depends on the usage. For someone who uses their printer professionally to serially print all day, sure, it’s probably worth it upgrading. Me? I really don’t care if my prints are slower. I really don’t find the Ender 3 hard to get a print right either. But I’ve been printing since the wooden Printrbot Simple about a decade ago, maybe I’m just used to it.
All great points. I thought he was asking if it was worth it to invest more on it. I was simply saying that if money wasn’t a limitation, there are great options that are a significant improvement. Some day my MK3 is outdated too. I wouldn’t buy one now, but I also am not sure I will buy the MK3.5 kit and spend the time installing it.
Oh, I see. Yes, that may very well be a matter of point of view. For me, modding the printer is part of the fun, not something I do to try desperately to stay on the cutting edge. :) The RepRap dream of “printers that can reproduce themselves” never fully materialized, but modding is the next best thing.
Does it already have a z-probe? Auto bed leveling was huge for my ender 5
Not yet, I was thinking BL Touch as it’s way cheaper on AliExpress, though the manual shows a CRTouch connection on the Sprite Pro and I haven’t researched yet if they’re compatible.
CR touch and BL touch are the same. It’s just creality’s name for it.
Inductive probes are probably the cheapest option. I paid around $5 for mine and it works great.
They accomplish the same thing, but the probe itself is very different.
Taken from a helpful reddit post: *The BLtouch is based on an hall-effect sensor, while the CRtouch has an optical switch. The BLtouch has a plastic and pointy pin, while the CR has a bulkier metal pin.
The CRtouch is slightly more precise than the BLtouch with a lower deviation delta. They both are more sensitive than the minimum stepping distance of 0.025mm that is found most frequently.
The BLtouch is at its fourth (3+1) iteration, while the CRtouch has been released relatively recently. There’s a lot of information on the BLtouch available on Antclab’s website, while there’s pretty much none for the CR.
I would go for the BL for two reasons: the smaller footprint of the probe behaves better on textured surfaces, and beacuse hall-effect sensors aren’t subject to drifting when aging (unlike the optical switch in the CR, that technically “wears out” and starts introducing an offset to the measurements).*
Thanks - I didn’t realize that crtouch is optical.
Creality cloned the bl-touched and called it crtouch
Hey I’m almost in the same boat! I have a 2018 Creality ender 3 which I’ve had sitting for a couple years now… I look at it in my garage constantly wondering when I will pick it back up. What is Bambu? What brought you back into the hobby?
Bambu is a company that’s making some hype at the Moment. They print fast and neat. Though a major caveat is that they’re cloud-driven. To the point that recently they had problems with running gcode when not asked to.
(Or at least moving.)
cloud-driven
Yah, that can just go fuck itself.
I just took the dive on a P1P and you can print offline using an SD card just fine, it’s just not really pointed out. My E3V2 served me well over the years but the Bambu is a game changer
I had moved back in 2020 and the space I picked to be my shop/lab wound up being the space where I shoved everything that didn’t get used regularly, to be organized later. I’ve now gotten married and have the help and motivation needed to get the space cleaned up and useful. I was more into functional printing, but nowadays I’m printing art and knick knacks for the family, which has been fun.
That should all be fine, I’m pretty sure the cable in the Sprite pro upgrade kit terminates into jst connectors for the old style boards.
As for octoprint it will run with Klipper but I think it has trouble when trying to push speed, seems like most people recommend mainsail or fluid for the Klipper host.
Ah good to know. When the new Ender gets here it will probably inherit the Octoprint setup then. I’m slowly accepting that I’ll need to upgrade the old mainboard to use Klipper and get the most out of the motors/etc. I just know that once I’m sitting and looking at the old board and extruder, I’m going to be wanting to turn them into a third machine… 🤦♂️
I highly recommend switching to fluidd or mainsail. They don’t require any more CPU power than octoprint (possibly a bit less, actually). They are more modern and polished interfaces than octoprint.
Second this, I run mainsail for my voron and octoprint for my prusa, mainsail is just way nicer of an interface Imo, especially on mobile.
Do “more modern and polished UIs” make up for the loss of extensibility via plugins? Octoprint has bazillion of them, and I would take killer and productive ones like spool manager over subjectively better look
The architecture is a bit different than octoprint. Fluidd and mainsail are purely client side UI’s, while Moonraker provides the server side API for them to connect to. So any additional functionality would need to integrate with Moonraker - not Fluidd/Mainsail.
A lot of functionality that is plugin based in octoprint is core to Moonraker and fluidd/mainsail. Things like cameras, mesh bed tools, gcode viewer, UI layout customization, power device control, etc are all included.
Spool manager is not something I’ve personally needed or used, but this would probably be a good option: https://github.com/Donkie/Spoolman
Yeah, that’s what strikes me about Moonraker and its UIs: they seem more rigid and limiting than octoprint and its plugins ecosystem (I can spin one up in mere minutes to do pretty much anything), but those who love fluidd and mainsail them love them very much. I’d like to have someone explain to me why Moonraker is getting the lion share of the nerdier side of the community, it feels like I’m missing something obvious :)
