Ender 3 and the power of 3D printing community
I really like my Ender 3. After several necessary upgrades, I think I’ve reached a place where it’s dependable and I know it well enough to fix most of the issues. Moving apartments forced me to pull it apart. That became a perfect opportunity to build it back up into something better.
I’ve always had an issue with leveling the bed - me, and everyone else who bought this printer. For a short period I have managed with a glue stick. It was time to look into bed probes. At this point there are some very precise solutions, like the Cartographer 3D, but that felt like too much complexity and too much fidelity for such an unsophisticated printer.
The most straightforward would be to go with BLTouch.
Nah, too mainstream and looks goofy… I went with Klack Ender.
Klack Ender uses Omron’s mechanical switch. Same type used in the printers limit switches. I went with this one because I just find the design inspired! It took me a few tries to build it sturdy enough. I have started by printing the parts, but that print suffered from being printed on the same Ender 3, that lacked a bed leveling probe. I have decided to order all the printed parts from PCBWay, 100% infill, ABS filament. These had a bit of issues with magnet holes being too loose, but that was easy enough to solve with super glue. Klack’s design depends on some parts making tight contact with each other, which caused me some issues. Its design isn’t perfect but I find it to be clever and fun. Other probes aren’t something your printer grabs, when it starts probing, and parks when it’s done. I like watching it go through that dance. While I don’t know how well it’ll perform over time, it works well now. All my prints adhere well, without the glue stick.
Troubleshooting my printer’s issues, building Klack Ender, moving to Klipper - all these experiences made me appreciate this machine and this community. Ender 3 is far from perfect but it’s well understood. It feels owned by community. That’s in big part to Creality making Ender’s design open source. That wouldn’t happen without Naomi Wu - not all heroes wear capes… some of them don’t wear much clothing altogether.
At the time of writing, Ender 3 is around 7 years old. There’s so many alternatives nowadays. It’s not uncommon to see “don’t recommend Ender 3 as the first printer” posts. Bambu Lab’s printers are great alternatives, with some of them matching Ender’s price. If you follow 3D printing, you probably know about controversies around Bambu Lab’s sneaky firmware update, which enforces dependence on their cloud application. I have no interest in connecting my printer to the internet. There are legitimate reasons to do so and legitimate reasons to close your ecosystem, the way Bambu Lab chose to… I’m just not interested in them. Those aren’t there for me, but for the company that believes their financial success is tied to how much control they can exert over their customers.
What benefits me is the ability to fix my 3D printer, to upgrade it, to understand how it works and where its weaknesses lie. That’s significantly easier to do when it’s a simple design, with public documentation.
Last 5 years we’ve witnessed a lot of discussion around ownership and repairability. Most of our society is content with purchasing the next, new thing. Every year Apple promises their N+1 iPhone will change our lives.
Changes used to be opt-in. Nowadays, whenever you hear about a new feature, latest “improvement”, the clock starts ticking. Soon your device won’t support some of the apps you’ve used to depend on. You might be content with your phone’s photos app, but the actual owner of your device decided it’s time to move everything around, round some corner and hide some features, 3 levels deep, in a menu you didn’t know existed. There are people trying to claw back some of the control, over devices we should fully own. 3D printing community built a fort, stockpiled weapons, manned the walls, secured supply lines and trained their troops.
Not every industry can follow in the 3D printing community footsteps. The openness and hackability is in the FDM printing DNA. That however, doesn’t guarantee it will stay that way forever. It is the community, people like Naomi Wu, Kevin O’Connor or Joseph Prusa (yes, I am aware there are many people who deserve to be mentioned), or hundreds of educational YouTube channels (Maker’s Muse, Teaching Tech, ModBot - some of my favourites), that guard the spirit of this space. Notice that, in spite of the strong open source roots of the 3D printing industry, many new businesses sprang up around it. You do not need to hold an iron grip over your product and control its every aspect, to make a profit.
I think many will agree that the current peak of the community effort is the Voron project. This is how the project introduces itself:
The original goal of the VORON project, back in 2015, was to create a no-compromise 3D printer that was fun to assemble and a joy to use. It had to be quiet, clean, pretty, and continue to operate 24 hours a day without requiring constant fiddling. In short a true home micro-manufacturing machine without a hefty price tag. It took over a year in development, with every part being redesigned, stress tested and optimized. Shortly after the release a vibrant community formed around the project and continues to grow today. This community is part of what makes VORON such a special experience.
The Voron team doesn’t sell printers. They design them out of love for the hobby. My interest in building Voron intensifies!
This post is nothing more than expressing my gratitude towards this community. It’s easy to focus on all these rotten ghouls, using technology as a tool to further their morally abhorrent goals. 3D printing community reminds me what tech industry could be.
I’ll gladly keep my Ender 3 for years to come. I expect it’ll ask for more of my time to keep it running smoothly but I also expect it’ll teach me a lot.
Oh, have some interesting links. Here are some businesses building their business model on 3D printing: