My Customized 3D Printer

Handcrafting and DIY have always meant a lot to me. It started with Lego, then grew into experimenting on materials and electronics to satisfy the question of how and why things work. In high school I discovered 3D printing, and once I became a student I finally got my own printer, an Ender 3 v2 NEO that I still use today.

Two years of upgrades

After printing toys for my nephews and getting comfortable with the basics, I started pushing the printer further. Over two years I replaced the extruder with a BMG direct drive system, swapped in an E3D V6 hotend, converted the Z axis to a belt-driven design, and compiled and flashed customized Marlin firmware. I added a Banana Pi single-board computer to control the printer and enabled remote access over Telegram and the local network.

Calibration and multi-material printing

I printed TPU, PETG, and ABS, each with dedicated pressure advance calibration for the custom hotend, and calibrated input shaping on the X and Y axes using an MPU6050 IMU. I also managed to get multi-color printing working with Sharpies, layering color changes into otherwise single-material prints.

Mistakes along the way

Not everything went smoothly. I once shorted the motherboard and tried to diagnose it by tracing the PCB design myself, but it was a dead end. In the end I replaced it with a newer board and reconfigured everything from scratch.

From printing to designing

Along the way I picked up Fusion 360 so I could design my own 3D models instead of only printing other people's. That combination of electronics, modeling, and 3D printing is what let me build my Wear Pico smart watch project.

Conclusion

This printer taught me how mechanical, electronic, and software systems bind together, and it still helps me create tools, enclosures, and robotics parts today. I'm grateful for the open-source community behind this technology; none of these upgrades would have been possible without their shared knowledge.