I’ve recently returned to the hobby, after some lifestyle changes brought on by the pandemic. It’s been a lot of fun catching up on the latest developments, like the emergence of Bambu, etc. My printer is an Ender 3 from Sainsmart, bought in late 2019. I’m guessing it’s one of the earliest hardware revisions. I printed a few of the suggested upgrades back when I first bought it, but it was printing pretty well out of the box, so I never did any real mods.

I couldn’t help but pick up some recent deals: I ordered the Ender 3 V3 SE, along with a Sprite Pro extruder and dual Z-axis kit - so I can still have a nice machine to print with while I upgrade and tune my old one.

So I wanted to ask the community a few things:

• Am I likely to need a new motherboard to run this extruder? Hoping I can get away with just firmware

• Same question, but for Klipper? I currently run Octopi, if I switch away from Marlin, will I also need to drop that as well?

• Are there any other mods I should be considering to maximize the machine’s potential? I’d like to use what I have available where possible, just couldnt resist the Sprite Pro as I want to do ASA and TPU.

Would love to hear folks’ thoughts, seems like a better time than ever to be in the hobby!