Modernizing an Ender 3
Modernizing an Ender 3
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:
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Am I likely to need a new motherboard to run this extruder? Hoping I can get away with just firmware
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Same question, but for Klipper? I currently run Octopi, if I switch away from Marlin, will I also need to drop that as well?
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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!
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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 :)