This sub has me conflicted, when looking up reviews for the mini+ I constantly see “it’s great once you replace the extruder with the bondtech one” especially on YouTube, there are almost no reviewers where people are using the included extruder.
Since I’m waiting a few weeks for my mini to arrive anyways should I just order it now and not even bother with the included one? it’s my first printer but I’m an over-prepared type of person… I already have my enclosure a bunch of filament and octoprint set up!
What are your thoughts on this? Ugh I wish Prusa had fixed the common problems with their extruder people seem to encounter on the mini by now.
Believe me, I know all too well how exciting it is to give your printer unnecessary upgrades. But hopefully this will prevent someone from going down the rabbit hole that I did.
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The Bondtech extruder is a total no-brainer upgrade at this point. The improvements to build quality are 100% noticeable and installation is a snap. Ever since firmware v4.3.3, setting the extruder steps and is dead simple (no custom firmware required). The built-in filament sensor works great as well. Note: You'll want to modify your printer's retraction settings in your slicer (length of 1.5mm and retraction/detraction speed of 35mm/s worked perfectly for me).
In contrast, the Bondtech heat-break is a bit of a nightmare. Heat-break installation can be tough, especially if you don't have experience fiddling with the hot end; you risk breaking the fragile wires. Even if the installation wasn't a pain, the best-case scenario is your print quality isn't impacted. More likely, you'll be constantly battling stringing with PID calibration and retraction settings. Going back to the stock heat-break and replacing the PTFE tube solved all my problems.
If you have extrusion problems (layers tearing, clogging) a few weeks into owning your printer swap out the hotend PTFE tube for the one that came with the kit. This is a common issue resulting from the original PTFE tube being too short/shrinking. Changing out the PTFE tube is super simple and well documented. Pay special attention to the step requiring you to apply pressure and pre-compress the tube.
Happy printing!
Story starts with a CR-10 gifted by a friend, it's an older model, so I modernized it a little bit. These are what I have done:
- Original control board -> MKS robin e3
- Single Z -> belt sync single stepper dual Z
- original remote extruder and hotend -> direct drive Voron afterburner with e3d volcano
- no remote control -> Nanopi Neo2 + octoprint
- separate controller box -> rearrange everything into the chassis
After these mods it performs pretty good, except I'm not a big fan of single motor dual z design, however mistake was made, MKS robin e3 only has 4 drivers, dual z with single driver is an even worse option for me.
Solution:
Last year I built a corexy machine, during that build I learned klipper could run with multi mcu, so I had an idea of a controller just for extruder, so I can have as many extruder I can without worrying about not having enough stepper driver on main board, an unlimited tool changing without expensive controller, but at that time klipper doesn't support cross mcu probing or endstop and I didn't really need tool-changer, so I never put any effort into the idea.
Now with the CR-10 this idea became a necessity, coincidentally cross mcu probing are supported by klipper just recently. So after hours of KiCADing, days of waiting, hours of hand soldering, my first extruder controller is finished.
https://preview.redd.it/4giyonn4vh981.jpg?width=1704&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f5c7ef874451b4c427527975d890320f617100a
And it was a fail, the none standard USB port was loose, board has no mounting hole, size are too large and thick. But it is promising, I have some good printing result with it, however prints last longer than 20 minutes might crash randomly, after grounding the x gantry this problem is solved, probably static electricity generated by the belt caused those crashes.
Another several hours of KiCADing, days of waiting, hours of hand soldering, the second design was a total failure. And it's far worse, sometimes cant even finish homing. And all of the problem are caused by emi, which I completely ignored.
Back to the drawing board. Finally the third version was finished.
https://preview.redd.it/jx6f6vfmvh981.jpg?width=4656&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1f5e7d0d0c792d3bdb35afc9f555235e56a9e673
And it works.
- thermistor √
- TMC2209 driver √
- Fan x 2 √
- Servo/Probe √
- endstop √
- Filament runout sensor √
- ADXL345 support √
- Status LED √
- Heater √
- Onboard ste
Looking for recommendations on all metal extruder’s thank y’all!
