3DPrinting @lemmy.world cwc @lemmy.world 1 yr. ago

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:

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!

24 comments

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.
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.
  
  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 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.

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