An open software platform for the Ender-3 V3 KE.
Fre3nder is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Creality. Ender and Ender-3 are trademarks of their respective owner.
Current version: 2026.1
2026.1 FUNCTIONALLY ACHIEVED on the investigated reference system.
Fre3nder provides an open X2000 host, upstream Klipper integration for the
F005 MCU, a hardware-validated reference configuration, and a documented path
back to Stock. The current product focus is maintainable post-2026.1
development and qualification.
The important boundaries remain:
- software-only Fre3nder -> Stock: REQUIRES QUALIFICATION;
- power-cycle Stock recovery: QUALIFIED ON DEVICE (2/2);
- physical PC22 backlight effect: REQUIRES QUALIFICATION;
- complete display/touch stack: NOT IMPLEMENTED.
Observations marked as qualified apply to the investigated reference system unless explicitly stated otherwise. Do not treat its calibration, hardware revision, or recovery behavior as universal.
- What Fre3nder builds and how to build it
- Current configuration and hardware contract
- Installation and deployment boundary
- Recovery and return to Stock
- Development and tests
- Current roadmap
- Licensing and provenance
- Acknowledgements
The current implementation is organized as follows:
build/ reproducible current build recipes
configs/ current Fre3nder host and F005 configurations
patches/ patches required by current builds
scripts/ current build, deployment, recovery, and test tools
tests/ current product tests, where present
docs/ current product documentation
research/ active research, bring-up, analysis, and history
research/ is an active project layer, not a dead archive. It
contains reverse engineering, hardware discovery, prototypes, experiments,
historical qualification records, and rejected alternatives. New work on the
display, touch, camera, sensors, MCU protocols, or bootloader starts there.
Qualified findings may be adopted into the productive tree, but productive
code, builds, configurations, and runtime must never depend on research/.
Read AGENTS.md before any hardware-related work. Offline builds
do not authorize deployment or persistent printer changes. Keep device-specific
information in the ignored docs/local-device.md, created from
docs/local-device.example.md, and never store
secrets in the repository.
Project-authored Fre3nder system material is licensed under
AGPL-3.0-or-later. Project-authored material in research/ is
licensed under MIT unless a file is third-party or derived material. See
docs/licensing-and-provenance.md for the
path-specific licensing and provenance policy.