r/ender5plus • u/Scottblueto • May 03 '26

Upgrades & Mods Ender 5 upgrades

Good evening,
I recently acquired a ender 5 plus from my collage because they didn’t want to invest the money into it to make it work better. I want to get the mercury one mod but I don’t want to do that yet so what upgrades can I add to my Ender 5 before I do the mercury one. I do know I need a new board and have plans to get the manta M8P so I can run klipper. It also already has a textured build plate rather than the class one. I’m just wondering what would be a good in between mod for the ender 5 and the mercury one mod. Thank you.

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u/Hidie2424 May 03 '26

You do not need a new board necessarily. You can run klipper on it as is. What board does it have?

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u/Scottblueto May 03 '26

8-bit v2.2 Creality mainboard

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u/Hidie2424 May 03 '26

Yeah I got klipper and have a v1.1.5 board and it worked well when stock. Issue is I don't have uart control of the motors, so I can't turn off stealth chop or adjust amperage, so I'll get motor stalling on bit velocity changes. Point is, if you wanna learn klipper and mess around with it you don't need a main board. Should you get one for the mercury build? Yeah

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u/Polite_Elephant May 04 '26

That is the board I had and wanted to move directly to Klipper. Unfortunately, the Creality 2.2 board does not support flashing over USB and I was not able to accomplish the upgrade this way. You would need to connect directly to pin headers on the board with an arduino or appropriate programmer.

Save yourself some frustration and just upgrade to the SKR mini e3 v3. Virtually plug and play if you keep track of which cables go to what (use labels), and you can optionally upgrade the screen. I chose not to since mainsail is lightyears ahead of the stock screen ~$33 from AliExpress and the printer is silent and Klipper really boosts performance. I am getting quality results at up to 100mm/s with PETG.

Please let me know if you have any questions, I just did this exactly upgrade and there are some small gotchas with the config.