Installing the MicroSwiss Direct Drive on my Ender 3 Pro

cerkit

Jul 4, 2020 • 3 min read

I recently ordered the MicroSwiss Direct Drive unit with the all metal hotend for my Ender 3 Pro. I was going to upgrade the extruder to an all metal extruder kit from WINSINN and then upgrade the hotend to the MicroSwiss all metal hotend, but then I saw this kit and decided to upgrade to Direct Drive instead.

I got the kit and installed it yesterday. Here is a good video from ModBot about the installation. I followed this video to do my installation.

MicroSwiss Direct Drive installation from ModBot

Here are some pictures and notes from my installation.

Take care to correctly position the heater block. I initially installed mine upside down and backwards and had to redo it. The thermistor goes toward the rear of the assembly and the hole is to the right.

The fitting that came on my part did not securely hold the Capricorn Tubing

The 3D printed part that holds the original PTFE tube did not securely hold my Capricorn tubing. However, the kit came with a replacement part that did. I just removed the one that was in the part and replaced it with the other one.

Replacement fitting for Capricorn tubing

I had to make changes to my firmware. I had to change the offsets for the BLTouch as well as the X and Y bed offsets in configuration.h.

#define X_MIN_POS -5
#define Y_MIN_POS -19

Otherwise, my printer tried to print off the left of the print bed as well as print off the front of the build plate.

Once I made those changes, it worked perfectly. Next, I tuned my PID and calibrated my e-steps following videos on YouTube.

I wanted to try some flexible filament, so I loaded it in and started to print the flexible octopus.

I didn't make any adjustments to the print speed or the retraction settings. I later learned that this was a mistake. It is recommended to print TPU with no retraction and a slow print speed of between 15-30mm/s.

I had a jam because I was printing too fast. I also had a few of the octopus feet come off the bed and curl up. I tried again with slower print speeds, no retraction, and 50% part cooling fan.

I've always wanted a green flexible octopus, and now I have one.

I printed the frog with 5% infill and it was a lot softer.

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