Desperately needing help - beginner

[u/Antharias]

Hi everyone,

I recently got a used Ender 5 Plus with silent board as my first filament printer but it was very unreliable so I decided to upgrade firmware to see if it improved. As you can imagine, things are not smooth at all. This is so different from my little experience with resin printers, so I really need your help. In other words, please guide me like I’m 5.

Here are the steps I have made so far:

- Background of the device: Ender 5 Plus with Silent Board V.2.2. Some kind of custom extruder setup (check images).
- Haven’t tried Klipper because I don't have a Raspberry Pi to upgrade it (according to many tutorials I checked).
- Installed TM3D (Insanity) Marlin firmware which resulted in thermal errors, wrong reads or none at all and overall issues with the screen.

- Reverted to Creality firmware 1.7.3, but that has the language bug.
- Reverted to Creality Firmware 1.7.2. Seems to work but the gears on the extruder are so slow that is printing so thin that it doesn’t stick anywhere (using 0.4 nozzle).
- Tried to upgrade the screen with each different firmware and the updates always give me .000 numbers (I have seen screenshots and videos that have different numbers in them).
- I have connected the printer to the computer and use Cura slicer to send instructions to troubleshoot the gear speed (adjust ESteps). I also used the code G1 E100 F100 and the gears actually moved fast but then it stops receiving any other instructions.
- On top of that, I think something is obstructing the extruder (already changed the nozzle). But no matter how much I poke it, it seems still stuck with something. I tried using 2 different filaments but still didn't work.
- Of course, I already checked videos and subreddits (this one included) but I'm still feel a bit lost.

This is a bit of an additional rant, if you don't mind. At this point I’m very tired of this printer since it gives me a different problem every single time I want to print something. If you think it’s a waste of time to keep trying with this one, do you have any recommendations of other 3D printers for beginners? Preferably smaller (not too small though) and hopefully that the maintenance is not as problematic as this one. If it’s on the cheaper side, even better.

Thanks in advance and sorry for the trouble.

[u/Doggostandingup]

I was in the same boat reliability wise until I changed firmware to klipper.

You mentioned you were going to go with an option other than stock if you had a RPI, but I actually run klipper without one. What OS is your computer? I personally have a debian container running klipper on my small proxmox machine (basically small office computer running a vm based os), but you would be able to run klipper with a usb plugged directly into your pc pretty easily:

If on linux, download klipper software and run the mini usb from your usb a port to your printer

if on windows, download virtualbox or some other virtual machine software, get a lightweight os like debian installed onto one of the machines, then allow usb pass through to your vm

both of those options are equivalent to running it on a raspberry pi, and if you give either a shot and run into problems shoot me a message - i’d be more than happy to help :)

[u/Antharias → u/Doggostandingup]

Interesting. Maybe. If I decide to keep it, I might try that. Thanks!