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!

  • Thanks4NothingEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    They accomplish the same thing, but the probe itself is very different.

    Taken from a helpful reddit post: *The BLtouch is based on an hall-effect sensor, while the CRtouch has an optical switch. The BLtouch has a plastic and pointy pin, while the CR has a bulkier metal pin.

    The CRtouch is slightly more precise than the BLtouch with a lower deviation delta. They both are more sensitive than the minimum stepping distance of 0.025mm that is found most frequently.

    The BLtouch is at its fourth (3+1) iteration, while the CRtouch has been released relatively recently. There’s a lot of information on the BLtouch available on Antclab’s website, while there’s pretty much none for the CR.

    I would go for the BL for two reasons: the smaller footprint of the probe behaves better on textured surfaces, and beacuse hall-effect sensors aren’t subject to drifting when aging (unlike the optical switch in the CR, that technically “wears out” and starts introducing an offset to the measurements).*

    • @dackEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Thanks - I didn’t realize that crtouch is optical.