I finally got around to fixing and upgrading my Ender-3. I’ve had my Ender3 for almost 2 years now and have occasionally been upgrading when needed. Last year I made my best upgrade to the “silent board” TMC2208 stepper drivers. Which significantly silenced the noise of the printer when printing. As well as a BL touch which helps with bed leveling. (Read more about that process here)
I hadn’t upgraded it much further than adding an Octoprint device (wireless control software for controlling and printing and a bunch of other features.) But I wanted to spend a bit more time working on the firmware and hardware because of several issues/features. One was a heating issue if I printed twice before it cooled down. Another major one was I needed to modify the firmware for PID Bed tuning (basically calibrating the temperature for my printer to know what the sweet spot is for keeping stable temperatures). I wanted to add “fast probing,” which made the bed leveling process much faster before it started printing, which I learned about thanks to Crosslink’s blog post.
I moved my printer upstairs and closer to my desk for easy access and quick printing. As well as using an old laptop, I had to lie around for the Octoprint server and the laptop screen as a sort of 3D printer screen monitor. Which displays the webpage, where I can use the touchscreen to control and view information about the printer. Thanks to a nifty program called Ubuntu Frame, Ubuntu Frame uses the screen in “Kiosk mode,” which runs a website in a stripped-down version of chromium at bootup. Thanks to UI customizer, an Octoprint plugin, I could customize the home screen to look sleeker and in Dark mode, which made it easier for the eyes to see and navigate.
(What’s dark mode? Click the icon below to see)
I was also able to successfully program Marlin firmware for my printer with the features mentioned earlier. And ran the PID tuning. Another upgrade I wanted to make was to switch to Direct Drive. I had a direct drive setup from another project printer that I wasn’t using, and since in the future I wanted to run flexible plastics that would better run with Direct Drive, I decided I might as well install it at the same time.
Took a couple of beauty shots with my brother Simeon’s camera while it was printing, and here’s the result:
