Mellow

Aka. P. Defendant.

The best upgrade I made for the Ender 3 for adhesion was a PEI coated build plate. I don’t know the specs of the V2, but the brand I went with was “Wham Bam Systems” mine didn’t have a magnetic bed so I had to purchase the kit with the magnetic plate, and stainless steel PEI coated build surface. It was nice being able to pull off the plate and pop prints off of it. Be careful printing PETG on PEI it can fuse to the PEI

If the V2 has some sort of leveling system make sure it’s working correctly or the PEI sheet isn’t really going to help. Mine did not. I had so many failures where the print head crashed into the sheet and gouged it. The Z end stop wasn’t the best. I added a BLTouch probe and flashed the firmware and it got much better.

Creality is good because they brought an entry level 3d printer to market for an affordable price, and people like me got into the hobby because of that. The price point shows in the parts they use to assemble it. I’ve clocked countless hours learning how to correct failures, and upgrade the cheap parts for better, more reliable parts, add features, modify and flash firmware.

Five and a half years ago I bought that ender 3 pro. I think it was around $250 USD. I probably spent over $300 more upgrading it and replacing parts. In retrospect I shouldn’t have cheaped out, but that’s the conclusion I came to. I no longer want to waste time fixing the printer. If I walk away and don’t print anything for weeks/months at a time I’d like to have confidence when I fire it up it’s going to work.

I ordered a Prusa MK4S about a month ago which was the top-end hobbyist printer back then, and I am blown away by the difference. Prusa may not be the top at the moment, but the quality and support is there.

I recommend that unless you have the free time, you’re willing to tinker, and are not easily frustrated, you should look into a higher quality brand.

Ethernet speeds historically were measured in 10/100. In my past life I worked for an a small rural isp. And part of my learning I was taught that cat5 was 8 strands of wire, or 4 twisted pairs. I got very familiar with crimping patch cables. If one strand were cut a network card would negotiate down to its lowest speed and still work at 10mbps. Operating on 4 wire or two pairs. It’s possible with those numbers you had a bad connection, or a broken strand in the cable and it auto negotiated down to 10mbps. To this day I still crimp my own cables, and I own a cheap cable tester to make sure the crimps and cables are good.

I’ve had very bad luck with raspberry Pi’s and SDCards. They just don’t seem to last very long. I swapped to usb storage and things got somewhat better. I just had a usb drive die after 3 to 4 years of use. When I was still using SD it seemed like multiple times a year. Heat. Power loss, you can only punch holes in silicon so many times before it wears out. Whatever the reason.

My approach for this is configuration backup not the entire os. I think this approach is better for when it’s time to upgrade the os or migrate to a new system.

For my basic Pi running WireGuard and DNS, I keep an archive of documentation on steps to reconfigure the system after a total loss. Static configs are backed up once, and If there are critical configuration items that change then I back those up weekly. I’ve got two systems (media related servers, not Pi’s) that I keep ansible playbooks to configure 90% of the system from scratch so it’s as hands off as it can be.

Old I.T. Proverb: Documentation is like sex. Even bad documentation is better than no documentation at all.

Can’t upvote today, and my account seems to be labeled as a bot.