Ender 5 Upgrades

I've got a lot of plans for the Ender 5, in total it will end up being quite an expensive machine but a lot of fun in the process, here are a few of the ideas that I've currently got in mind for it:

• Extruder Gear and Bowden Tubing Upgrade
• Ender 5 Board upgrade
• Silent Board Upgrade

Printables

• Bed Supports - Thingiverse link
• Bed Cable Strain Releif - Thingiverse link
• Z leadscrew upper bracket - Thinginverse link
• BL Touch mount - Thingiverse link
• LED mount (hotend) - Thingiverse link
• LED Strip (frame) - Thingiverse link
•  - Thingiverse link
•  - Thingiverse link
•  - Thingiverse link

Print Quality Upgrades

These should actually improve the quality of print that can be expected.

Aluminium Hotend
This one is a bit of a no-brainer as far as how it improves print quality. At around £65 it's one that will cost more than a lot of the others but try something like the micro swiss all metal hotend.

TL Smoothers
TL Smoothers are essentially boards with a few diodes on to 'smooth' out the signal being produced and are widely accepted to correct the "salmon skin" issue that is associated with the Ender 5 (although not all suffer) and they're very cheap at about a tenner for 4. I already have some from triangle lab, upgrading the board and stepper motor drivers will make this redundant though... worth it?. £12 Amazon link.

BL Touch
The BL Touch is a physical probe that enables the printer to create a "mesh", a map of the topology of the heat bed which gives the printer the ability to compensate for an uneven bed and helps provide and even first layer.  and here's a tutorial on how to install it.

Board Upgrade
This will increase the size of the board allowing for more marlin goodness, obviously this will necessitate a firmware upgrade.

MKS Gen-L V1.0 Integrated Mainboard MKS Gen L Amazon Link, YT Instructional

Stepper motor drivers:
Stepper motor drivers are necesarry for an upgraded board where the oem board has them soldered on. When installing there will be a bit of math needed to figure out the target voltage output for each but that's not tough. There are a few options, here's a quick youtube instructional and breakdown:

• A4988
  • Same volume as oem
  • These are the standard stepper motor drivers that are directly installed on the standard Ender 5 board. no real changes needed to accommodate them.
• TMC2100 - £25
  • Almost Silent
  • These are interesting beasts with 3 modes to them, probably not the ones that I'd buy but interesting nonetheless
    • Modes
      • Direct A4988 mirror
      • something else
      • crazy UART which feeds information back to the board for bed levelling
• TMC2130 - £28
  • Very slightly louder than 2100's
  • Good, pretty simplistic, doesn't offer the same intelligence as the 2100's, not for me.
• TMC2208 - £26
  • Almost Silent
  • A lot more of the functionality presented in the 2100's without so much wiring for the intelligent 3rd mode - this is probably the model to go for. Amazon Link
    • Modes
      • Direct Mirror
      • something else
      • super intelligent, needs a bit of wiring

Core X/Y
It looks as though it would be entirely possible to convert the Ender 5 into a core x/y machine, meaning that both x and y stepper motors control the motion of the hotend in both axis. To visualise here's the reprap wiki page to see what I mean. At the moment there aren't really any tutorials on anyone doing this but it doesn't look too hard so I'm sure someone will soon.