I wouldn’t say it’s “crazy difficult” to set up, but it is definitely a little involved. There will be a ton of documentation on setting it up for an ender printer so that shouldn’t be an issue, but it’s more work than simply “install it and go”.

The way your current set up works, is your pi/ octoprint is sending a file to your printers motherboard, the printers motherboard is processing the file and executing all of the commands. The pi isn’t doing any real work besides letting you interact with the printer’s motherboard.

In simple terms, the way Klipper works is by replacing the firmware on your printers board with a program that can talk to both Linux and the hardware of your printer (stepper motors, heat cartridges, fans, etc), using the pi to run all of the processing and such, then passing those commands to the printer’s board (which is now essentially a zombie that does nothing but what Klipper tells it to do).

Doing the main computation on a strong computer like a pi rather than the weaker CPU on a printer motherboard opens a plethora of options, one of the most popular being something called “input shaping” which is very relevant to your question. What that does is tests the vibration resonance of your printer and modifies stepper commands to counteract them, allowing you to print at significantly higher (read: sometimes 3x or more than stock) speeds without much if any noticeable decrease in quality.

Not only stuff like this, but there are innumerable QOL improvements over Marlin. Object exclusion for when one part out of a multi-part print fails, custom macros for anything you could want your printer to do, graphic bed level mesh… I honestly don’t know how I used my printer for so long without all of these things that seem like no brainers.

Long story short, it’ll probably take more than an hour or two to get set up, but as soon as you get it going you’ll be wondering why you didn’t do it day 1. If you’re at all serious about getting the most potential out of your printer, it’s an inevitability; the stock firmware is far too limiting in what you can do, and makes any kind of advanced tuning or tinkering either impossible or way harder than it needs to be.

Sorry to dump this wall of text on you! If you decide to give it a go, pick a weekend and hit the forums, shoot me a message if you get stuck on anything and I’ll help you best I can!

It took a bit to get used to because the mindset is different but once it’s going it’s great.

I love that I can make config changes easily without having to compile firmware.

If you ever decide to take the plunge feel free to reach out since I did it with my ender 3v2 years ago. Not that it looks anything like the stock anymore.

Looks like somebody else already has the config working for it and a step by step guide for setting it up on your machine

https://artamis.me/projects/klipper_guide/

One thing to note is you don’t have access to the display anymore since the display on the ender 3 is proprietary. You use a web panel (I often use my phone for this with mainsail as my ui of choice)

That being said there are other displays that can work with it but I seldom use my display for anything anymore.

Yea, I don’t think the se runs it out of the box but I’ve heard an rpi can be used

It’s so much fun to know your limits, and really useful when you’re prototyping parts.

I like modeling things like little tool holders to fit inside the railings on my printer, so sometimes need to print a couple of them to get the size just right. When doing these tests usually I print 0.6 nozzle, 0.3 layer height at 300m/s and 3000m/s^2 accel. Parts usually don’t come out super pretty, but more often than not I end up using the final “test print” rather than reprinting it at more reasonable speeds because I just need it to work, not look nice.

The official marlin-based firmware also “only” goes up to something like 200mm/s and 3000mm/s^2 for my model, but I’ve flashed klipper on it which has given me more control so I wasn’t constrained by the limitations set by the manufacturer in the firmware.

I was able to push it to 500mm/s print speed and 11000mm/s^2 accelerations, but small details started to suffer and I was getting too much ringing. For simple large prints I still use it though if I need a quick-ish prototype.

Yeah, absolutely and I’m even quite conservative with my acceleration. I could go quite a bit faster if I wanted too, without too many issues. The ringing would be somewhat more visible though.