Well, after my self imposed moratorium on major upgrades for 30 days, I've must have gone a bit overboard and unleashed a torrent of major upgrades which we can safely call Ender 3.75 Pro.

Hello all, this is your neighborhood Guy Who Doesn't Bother To Read Instructions and hope everyone is doing great. Sometimes success comes in the form of many small failures, and that's how I feel a lot of how my learning happens and progresses. I try not to think in terms of success and failures, and so to quote Big Sean, "No mistakes, only lessons."

Up on deck for this round of upgrades:

Added then wiring for the LED power switch on the Meanwell PSU

Purchased a very low cost linear rail/direct drive kit off Amazon (<$25). Hoo boy.

More prints with PETG.

First venture with Octoprint.

A lot of purchases related to the hot end..additional thermistors, heater cores, and heater blocks.

Going into the linear rails/dd kit, I knew I was up for some major challenges after going through all of the reviews and specifications. For one thing, this kit was made to work with the stock extruder and I had an all metal dual gear. Another challenge reviewers mentions was how tight the X axis belt was to reattach. I thought I could manage and ended up with a small tear in my belt. At the end of the day, I used a paper clip to get that missing 1-2 mm to attach the belt. The extruder installation went smooth because I ended up using some AMD mounts that I had laying around and that solved it quite easily. What I missed though, was all of thechanges required such as base temps, retraction length and speed which ended up in yet another clogged hotend/nozzle. There were also additional changes to the printhead size which required setting the X and Y MIN and MAX position in marlin, e-steps for the extruder, and the home offsets. As if I didn't have enough misery, I was trying to print with PETG.

The funny thing is that I don't think I had a lot of expectations a far as quality or speed improvements with these changes and maybe just wanted to start playing around with the flexible filaments (TPU). It's still to early to tell what the results are and I will try to keep you updated.

I also tried out Octoprint for Android and Windows. I think I prefer the Windows version since it's just a Python app that acts as a server to briwser clients. There are some minor hiccups I think related to it not being a Raspberry Pi a well as communication issues. All in all, I think Octoprint can definitely improve your quality of 3D printing life.

In non-3D printing news, I've been working on getting this dirt bike running that I've acquired and took apart and fixed my first carburetor.

Well, until next time. Hope everyone is safe and sound and 3d printing and not 2D printing!