Mistakes are to learn from.

In my haste thinking I've learned all the science behind setting up the Maestro I only crashed the nozzle into the bed twice with enough force to wreck the print surface in a decent sized area.

1. You will make costly mistakes even with decent reading.

2. Amazon has my new sheet and will be here Saturday!

All I can say is playing in unfamiliar territory is teaching me a lot of cool things. I've become proficient in properly terminating cables like these:

And thankfully Duet includes all of the fancy connectors needed to make the board fully operational.

Sadly this also caused me to notice the poor job Creality did in properly terminating their ends. Solder in crimps or soldered ends just jammed into Phoenix connectors. All wrong and a minor fire hazard since thermal runaway protection is disabled on stock firmware.

At least the motors and end stops were well done. Now I just need to design a case to hold the Maestro as it won't fit inside the compartment under the Ender 5. 😢

My first observation after running the new board and getting it working properly is that it's slick as heck. Some advanced features I wish our Marlin based Prusa's had but at the cost of working a bit different than Marlin which is proving to test my knowledge and study habits.

The good news it's up and running and the print quality is great. Stock Enders all have salmon skin effect to some extent but now it's running like a dream without any of the stock issues.

Plus I have access to this sweet bed visualizer right in the duet web menu and nifty little features on top of the print quality boost.

In the end the Maestro is a 32bit TMC driven board that runs $130 which is $10 more than an einsy. Setting up firmware is a breeze compared to Marlin and it's all because it's intuitive. And thankfully Chris Tilley walked me through the stuff that kept breaking my printer. 🙈

That's enough for now but stay tuned for print tests and other goodies plus more SL1 goodness.