Hello printadors.
Creality’s got a direct-drive extruder on some of their printers now, and it’s got some of the trendy features we’re all fans of. Most relevant to this topic, it’s got a breakout board on the print head, which accepts a 24-pin ribbon cable, instead of each component wiring separately into the controller. It’s good stuff, but it’s got a big problem: Creality don’t sell them separately. Which is problematic in the best case, because they do sell the Sprite extruder separately, without the board.
And in a lot of cases, the boards fail, which puts the whole printer out of commission unless you replace the extruder outright, or have the good fortune to still be under warranty and Creality sees fit to put a replacement board on the slow boat from China.
So, I’ve designed a replacement of my own. The first set of 5 prototypes have come in, and now I want to test them and find any design adjustments that need to be made, so a finalized design can be made available in Creality’s stead.
With all that said, I’d love to get the prototypes into the hands of some other Sprite owners to get feedback. Any Ender 3 S1 owners here who want to play with one of these boards?