I flashed custom firmware on my 3D printer to unlock useful features it shipped without

Published Aug 10, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with his head stuck inside a PC or tinkering with a server operating system. Besides computing, his interests include spending hours in long RPGs, yelling at his friends in co-op games, and practicing guitar. Ever since the Centauri Carbon dropped last year, I’ve been using it extensively for my 3D printing shenanigans. Thanks to its support for most consumer-grade filament types, it’s as effective at creating functional PETG and ABS prints for my home lab and microcontroller projects as it is at printing last-minute PLA props for my D&D campaigns. Personally, I haven’t had too many issues with its firmware, as it works well with custom slicers and Home Assistant, but I’d always wanted to customize the software aspects of this 3D printer. Well, one random doomscroll session led me to OpenCentauri, a project that not only includes a patched firmware that gets rid of minor CC1 quirks, but even supports a full-blown custom firmware featuring good ol’ Klipper. Having tested both for a week, I have to admit the community-created firmware packages are good enough to stand against the base software that ships with the Centauri Carbon 1. Before you go about running the patched firmware or its COSMOS counterpart on your Centauri Carbon 2, you’ll want to be mindful of its warranty. According to the developers, there haven’t been definitive cases where folks got their warranty service requests denied after arming their CC1 with custom firmware. But as someone who runs custom firmware and distros on proprietary hardware frequently, I’d still suggest keeping the warranty risks under consideration before you follow through with this experiment. The OpenCentauri patched firmware adds neat QoL features to the first-gen CC All while retaining a lot of UI elements from the official Centauri Carbon 1 firmware Starting with the simpler of the two packages, OpenCentauri’s patched firmware brings a couple of much-needed features to the Centauri Carbon 1 without going overboard with the UI or toolkit tweaks. For one, it enables SSH access for the CC1 over Wi-Fi, which is pretty handy if I want to troubleshoot catastrophic software failures. I’ve also had this pet peeve with the base firmware where the printer outright refuses to accept new .gcode files if it’s already engaged in a print, which only gets exacerbated when the CC1 is engaged in 24+ hour operations. Thankfully, the patched firmware gets rid of this problem by letting me upload new files even when the printer is busy turning filament rolls into tangible models. It removes the Store redirect from the web UI, and lets me check the filament usage via its API. I’ve got my CC1 hooked up to my mesh Wi-Fi, but I also appreciate that the patched firmware supports Ethernet dongles. The best part? Flashing OpenCentauri on the Centauri Carbon is a piece of cake. First, I downloaded the firmware files from the official OpenCentauri website, formatted a cheap USB drive to FAT32 and dropped the install_opencentauri folder into its main directory before plugging it into my CC1. Then, I navigated to the drive via the printer’s touchscreen, opened the IMPORT_ME_DO_NOT_PRINT file by holding it and tapping the Import button, and chose the Install Patched (Online) option from the Install Centauri menu. Removing it is just as simple, as I simply need to press the Install Official option from this menu. The Klipper-based COSMOS completely overhauls my CC1’s functionality Its web UI is perfect for adjusting the finer aspects of this 3D printer Unlike the OpenCentauri patched firmware, its beta-only COSMOS counterpart completely overhauls every aspect of the 3D printer. For starters, it replaces the Elegoo web UI with a Mainsail-based interface, which brings dozens of advanced tweaks, toggles, and options to the mix. And I’m not just talking about the MCU bed, MCU toolhead, and chamber temps metrics that it can pull, either. The new web UI on COSMOS lets me execute G-code commands, view the shell output, run macros, and configure practically every aspect of the toolhead, fans, and extruder. It also features many of the QoL tweaks added to its patched equivalent, and I really love the heightmap and G-code viewer built into its web interface. On top of that, the COSMOS firmware has custom scripts to improve my prints’ accuracy, and I can even calibrate the CC1’s operations by writing to the Klipper configuration files. That said, you might not want to jump into COSMOS as a beginner Although I plan to stick with COSMOS for my 3D-printing misadventures, I have to mention that it’s not something you should look into as a newcomer. Installation-wise, COSMOS has a similar procedure to the OpenCentauri patched firmware, though the subsequent first-boot sequence is somewhat longer. I also had to let the CC1 calibrate itself, which took another 10 minutes or so. Since I use OrcaSlicer to prepare my models, I had to modify the machine start G-code to account for the chamber temperature and other metrics for my PLA prints, or they’d end up failing outright. The official COSMOS wiki does a good job of explaining all that, though I still had to tweak a bunch of settings in the Mainsail web UI and OrcaSlicer to prevent my 3D printer from displaying weird errors when I start a print. Unfortunately, COSMOS still doesn’t support the split processing functionality that Klipper is famous for, which is a bummer since I wanted to use my Raspberry Pi to expand the CC1’s processing capabilities. Two models 3D-printed on the COSMOS firmware; the left one's GCODE had fewer tweaks (and more stringing) That said, I tried printing a few models with the COSMOS firmware, and the results were mostly good. I had a print where the stringing was a tad too much, though I also got a really neat (if somewhat large) D&D model without any noticeable imperfections. Honestly, I’m really impressed with both the patched and COSMOS firmware packages. They’re not perfect by any means, but they can unlock some handy features for the OG Centauri Carbon, and I’d love to see them evolve over time.