A-Train’s Ender3000 3D printer.

Deep inside the recesses of HackLab, a Frankenstein 3D printing monster was brought to life! A-Train, a long-time member and seasoned 3D printer enthusiast, hacked together two Creality Ender 3 printers that saw very limited use in the lab to create a beast with two extruders capable of simultaneously printing two different colours and/or materials. He calls it the Ender3000!

“So I was thinking, ‘How could I creatively dispose of these [3D printers]?’,” asked A-Train. “They were useless because they don’t offer anything unique… I could make them do something that the other printers didn’t do.”

The lab is lucky to have several newer, high quality, 3D printers that are far more capable then the two individual Ender 3s. The Ender3000 is an IDEX, or independent dual extruder printer which means that you can print with two materials at the same time. This can be used for printing with two different colors or types of material simultaneously.

Ender3000 printing a two-colour HackLab logo.

In addition to the Ender 3s, the printer was built with a Raspberry Pi 3 that was already associated with one of those printers, a $10 box of rubber belts and some other spare parts from around the lab.

Klipper, a free and open-source software and firmware ecosystem, makes the whole thing possible. A-Train used two micro-controllers that were taken from the original printers. One handles Z axis movement and the extruders, and one handles X and Y axis movement. The Raspberry Pi, running server-side software from Klipper, coordinates those two micro-controllers.

“It can run on any computer, it’s Python-based and it computes the movement a number of steps ahead of time,” said A-Train.

A-Train continues to work on fine tuning the Ender3000. He is adjusting the alignments of each extruder and testing different prints.

“The printer is also intended as a general lab test victim for learning about new software, teaching printer tuning, and experimenting with printer hardware & electronics,” said A-Train.