Adorable. And sad.

Baby Godzilla playing with city building blocks

Yes, I don’t know what (if any) firmware ships on BTT’s board, but their GitHub page has both Marlin and Klipper builds for all of their boards.

If you don’t know what Klipper is or how it works, now is a great time to learn. With the mods you’re mentioning it sounds like you’re very into printing as a hobby, Klipper is an eventuality. Within the first 15 minutes of having it set up you’ll be wondering why you ever used the stock firmware.

The swap is just about as easy as installing the stock board, except the cables aren’t perfect lengths and you have to look up a pin out for the board to put stuff in the right spot. The port in the front of the printer’s case also won’t line up, not will the mounting holes for the board itself; I just kinda janked mine in and it’s been working fine.

Yeah the new mobo worked for a while, I think it took around 8 or 9 days to ship to US. The tracking site never updated past saying the shipper was waiting for the item (even a week after it was delivered). But I started having some really odd issues with it after a month or two. I’m still not 100% sure what the cause of the issue was or if it was even specifically mobo related (I posted a lot here during that time if you peep my post history), but I ultimately ended up replacing it with an SKR mini E3 mobo, which I’m much more happy with.

Replacing the mobo should just be plug and play, all the cables are labeled, well routed, and are appropriate length, so it’s easy to rewire the stock configuration. Just to be safe though I would grab the newest version of the board firmware from their GitHub page and flash it, no telling what version it ships with.

Yeah the new mobo worked for a while, I think it took around 8 or 9 days to ship to US. The tracking site never updated past saying the shipper was waiting for the item (even a week after it was delivered). But I started having some really odd issues with it after a month or two. I’m still not 100% sure what the cause of the issue was or if it was even specifically mobo related (I posted a lot here during that time if you peep my post history), but I ultimately ended up replacing it with an SKR mini E3 mobo, which I’m much more happy with.

Replacing the mobo should just be plug and play, all the cables are labeled, well routed, and are appropriate length, so it’s easy to rewire the stock configuration. Just to be safe though I would grab the newest version of the board firmware from their GitHub page and flash it, no telling what version it ships with.

Not the exact answer you’re looking for, but if the only thing stopping you from soldering a premade button to your case is a lack of soldering iron (and I’m assuming the knowledge of how to use one), depending on where you live they are incredibly cheap and accessible, and for the kind of soldering you’d be doing here you can learn how to do it very quickly, probably a 15 minute YouTube video and some practice on spare wires.

If you’re into this kind of tinkering, you’re probably gonna need to use one anyways, it’s one of those things where you probably won’t use it all that often but it’s invaluable when you need it. I had to rebuild my printer a few weeks ago which included an upgrade to a stealthburner extruder and I do not trust that simply twisting and taping all of those wires together would’ve been sufficient.

I’m gonna steal this ogre for an NPC.

That’s lower than I expected. When I was last shopping for a new potential printer, bambus were starting at around $400. Good piece of hardware for that price, if you’re not crazy into the hobby aspect of printing and just need it to aid your other hobbies. Have fun with it!

Hey, that’s a pretty good price. I’m not a fan of bambu either, but for someone who just wants to print stuff I don’t think it’s a bad deal at all. That’s less than my stock Neptune 3 and probably a hell of a lot more reliable

relatively low initial investment

How much did you get it for? Bambus are not normally the “relatively cheap” options haha

I usually just use it to find some sort of peer reviewed recommendations (ie YouTube reviews) - it’s usually pretty easy to tell there who’s being genuine

I’m glad you got something that is meeting your needs so far! Lots of people going the bambu route as of late. If you want a tool that just works, it’s a brilliant machine, and if later down the line you do get more interested in the hobby side of things, you’ll a. already have basic maintenance and use experience, b. have a bulletproof backup printer when things on your project inevitability hiccup and stop working, and c. be able to print your own parts if you decide to go a self built route.

My submission

Perfect is the enemy of good.

This must be why I never like the good guys!

Do some poking around for your printer and slicer - for your printer, you need to know if you have a direct drive or Bowden tube setup, and for your slicer, you need to figure out how to modify the standard gcode.

Looking at some pictures online I’m pretty sure your printer is a direct drive. Again I’m not familiar with your slicer so I don’t know what your model looks like, but typically retraction tests will be a tower with different values printed on the side indicating how far the retraction distance is. For a direct drive, these values should be pretty small, likely topping out at just a couple mm at most.

A search for " <slicer name> retraction tower setup" should get you numerous tutorials for your slicer, just follow those guides and input a range appropriate to your setup and should be good to go

I can confirm this. I’m not a wolf expert, or even seen that many wolves really, but I have a dog and I don’t think she’d wear a bonnet.

Reg, why’d you just stab yourself in the shoulder?

Ah cmon, ain’t ya ever seen a movie?

Well of course I’ve seen a movie, but what the hell are ya doing?

Every time the guy stabs himself in a movie, it’s right before he kicks the piss outta the guy he’s fightin’!

Well that don’t… when that happens, the guys gotta plan Reg, what the hell’s your plan?

I dunno, but I’m gonna find out!

If it looks good enough, why bother?

good enough

You do understand what community you’re in, right? ;)

I don’t use orca slicer so I’m not familiar with how it works specifically, but are you sure that the retraction settings are actually changing between different sections? I made the mistake when I first started it just loading the model and letting it print with default settings from my slicer. If the GitHub doesn’t specify exactly how to enable the retraction tower settings, I would look up a guide on YouTube. If you’ve done temp towers, it’ll likely be set up in a similar fashion.

If your test starts at 0 and you don’t see any difference, it definitely it not working as intended; 0 retraction with result in a huge stringy mess, and going to the next step will be a significant change.

Edit: also maybe make sure that you are using the correct values for testing according to your extruder setup; if you are using a direct drive retraction tower on a bowden setup, the changes will be too small to make any discernible difference, and the lowest setting on a bowden test will likely be too high for a direct drive.