A co-worker was chatting about his brand new Bambu Labs A1 Mini. "I have a 3D printer", I remembered.
I purchased a Creality Ender 3 in December of 2018 with the hopes of printing doodads, enclosures for projects and anything else I might find online. I remember the excitement when the package arrived but unfortunately the only thing I remember 6 years later is being constantly frustrated trying to get the damn thing to just work.
His excitetment got me excited. I immediately thought, "I need one of these." Later that day I decided to dust off the Ender 3 and give it another go. I was shocked when I was holding a printed part about an hour later. The Ender 3 has a manually adjusted bed which seemly needs to be releveled often. The bed leveling process was always the biggest pain in the ass. It still has issues with detail and speed.
I had always wanted to try out OctoPrint so I loaded it up on a Raspberry Pi 3B. It only took about half an hour start to finish, a very painless process. Immediately I was warned that my old firmware had issues and could cause a fire.
Ignoring that warning and a few more successful prints later I decided to update the firmware. Looking online there are a few posts about how to do this with the old 1.1.3 control board. It required an Arduino and a few steps that seemed like something I didn't want to mess with. There were many more posts about upgrading the control board to SKR Mini E3.
Luckily I live within 30 minutes of a MicroCenter. Not only do they stock plenty of 3D printing bits and bobs, they also carry the SKR Mini E3. I purchased a few rolls of PLA, some new nozzles and the upgraded board. It took about 30 minutes to install the new board. I booted up the printer and started a print from OctoPrint.
I waited patiently as everything preheated and after waiting a few minutes I didn't hear any printing. I walked over to the printer to find the nozzle digging into my plate. My excitement got the best of me. After an auto home and bed releveling I was ready to start again. I don't have any tools to measure the levels but this thing is extremely quiet. I captured video of before and after and uploaded those to YouTube.
There is still a lot left to learn. My ultimate goal is to have a printer that I can tinker with less and print with more. I think I can do some more tuning to increase the speed but I am done at this point spending anymore money on this guy. It has served me well and I still plan on using it for less intricate PLA prints. I still have my eye on the Bambu Labs P1S w/ AMS which seems like a steal at the current sale price ($749).