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!

  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.)

      • rug_burn@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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