Review on 🚀 Streamlined Stability: Creality Complete Leveling Filament Carrying Solution by Payton Stovall

TL/DR: Overall I'm very happy with this upgrade kit on my Ender 5. Before installing these upgrades I had an impossible print time - for Bed misalignment and uneven extrusion that was sometimes under extrusion. This kit solved both problems, it's very quiet and I'm glad my printer is working again. For everyone else just wanting to upgrade their printer, these are worthy upgrades that should improve desktop security, improve print quality, and make your stepper motors quieter! I bought this kit with the intention of installing it in an Ender 5 which I also recently updated with a direct extrusion kit. My main goal was to get the BLTouch to fix the warping that was making it impossible to align my build plate and replace my board as I had an under extrusion issue which I have tried with everything but replacing the board to fix to solve it. If you have a factory Creality board (instead of the old 8-bit silent board) then this kit will be a huge boost to your sanity. The difference is shocking when your silent board comes with upgraded stepper motors that eliminate the squeaking that motors make when the printhead or bed moves. My shipment of this purchase contained a version 4.2.7 board which is a newer and improved 32-bit board from Creality and appears to be a genuine Antclabs BLTouch. The 32-bit board is also said to improve print quality and has a larger memory buffer, allowing BLTouch to be configured with additional add-ons such as a filament run-out sensor, unlike the previous generation 1.1.5 8-bit silent board. The cables in this kit were also long enough to reach my Ender 5. Installing the board is very easy as all the connectors your existing board uses go back into the same place. Take a picture first to get the link, peel off one by one, and you can watch video tutorials online if you need more help to install. Make sure the BLTouch cables do not touch any moving parts to avoid damage and use cable ties to secure the cables. You may also need to find a way to attach the BLTouch cables to the motherboard. There are 3-pin and 2-pin connectors for BLTouch. You can either place the 2-pin connector on the Z-axis as a stop, or place it next to the 3-pin BLTouch connector on top of the 5-pin connector. There is a flaw in the design of this board that could cause the 3 pin connector to detach and fall out, rendering the BLTouch inoperable. You can either solve this by gluing on the 3 pin connector, or if you are using all 5 pins (requires Marlin configuration to change stop z) you can carefully tack it with the 2 pin connector against the 3 -pin connector press -pin connector. in a 5-pin slot. Please note that the links provided in the post to print your own mount will not work if you have an Ender 5. Search online for print mounts for your Creality printer model. It's also worth noting that my setup required a 3mm lower mount. So watch this if your mount doesn't allow the BLTouch to sit low enough and the build platform cuts into the hotend tip first! I printed both mounts and modeled them before installing them. Since this is a plug-in board for the Ender 3 Pro, I had to flash the firmware to make it compatible with the Ender 5. If you have an Ender 3 Pro this should not require flashing. I first tried booting Creality's default Marlin firmware for Ender 5 with BLTouch, but that didn't work for me and I ended up having to create a custom Marlin installation. Commercial Creality firmware cannot be customized due to the way it is packaged, so I used the latest 2.0.x fix. Flashing the firmware isn't too difficult as this motherboard kit comes with a bootloader already installed and there are great tutorials on YouTube for the Marlin compilation process. I used to have a BigTreeTech board installed which was much more complex due to the need to do the bootloader part. The last operation is to adjust the stop offset on the z-axis. In my setup I removed the Z-Stop switch and programmed the Marlin to use the BLTouch as the Z-Stop and also set the sensor's Z-Offset to around -01.315. This offset was necessary because the BLTouch is under my printhead and the gap between the printhead and the bed means no interference with the bed. You can also use the G29 command to set Cura to align to BLTouch before each print. in the middle of the bed. With the G29 code set up in Cura, my newly installed BLTouch leveled and calibrated the table height in a 3x3 grid and then started printing. All five objects on my bed were successfully printed, which was not possible before due to adhesion issues due to bed deformation. I am very happy with this upgrade both in terms of price and functionality!