12/02/2026 :: It's alive!

I had a box of parts to *almost* make an entire 3D printer given to me by a friend of my mom's, so I finally decided to open it up and take a crack at making my own printer!

I started off with just connecting the board to a power supply and a display, and surprisingly everything worked first try! The screen turned on and the touchscreen on it, while not perfect, still surpassed my expectations.

I then tried to get the board to actually engage the steppers. This required reflashing the firmware (I used Marlin) with the appropriate stepper drivers specified. Turns out there are a *lot* of different kinds of drivers that you just plug into your board, and they use different kinds of communication protocols. In addition to tweaking the firmware I also needed to move around some bridge contacts to 'rewire' the board correctly for my specific driver setup.

It took some reiteration and sanity checks, but I got the board recognising the drivers in the end. Now I could control the steppers through the display which was really fun! The next step was to get the board communicating with a laptop, which proved to be much more arduos than I expected...

There's lots of popular printer controllers out there, which I don't have any knowledge about. I just chose one that showed up for me first, and that was Repetier-Host.

Apparently a bad choice...

At first I thought that Repetier was getting stuck on waiting for a temperature reading from the printer (at least that's one of the things it was telling me) which it'd never get since at that point I didn't have a thermistor connected to the board.

However, that wasn't it at all.

For some reason, Repetier-Host just *doesn't* work with MacBook (or at least my version) when it comes to establishing a USB connection to my printer board. So for about 4 hours, I was troubleshooting everything. Re-flashing the firmare 5 times (including a fresh version with no changes), playing with the baud rate, reinstalling Repetier-Host, and unplugging absolutely everything so it was just the board and the laptop.

Getting nowhere, I finally decided to just dump Repetier-Host, switching instead to Pronterface.

Right off the bat, seamlessly connected to the board and got it responding. Pronterface just immediately detected the printer, didn't even need to specify the baudrate!

In the end I got the steppers being controlled by both the board's display and through my laptop simultaneously.

I also partially disassembled the hotend that my mom's friend put together just to make sense of it, ultimately I want to design my own printer from scratch, including the hotend assembly.

Next steps are to get the extruder hooked up to make sure it works, as well as the endstops. I'll also work on a design for the printer and get the needed materials for a frame.