Considering building a Darwin with modern twists. Thoughts?

Hello all, new to the forum here. I've been in the 3D printing hobby for around 2 years now, and want to build another machine. I'm intrigued by the very early printers. There doesn't seem to be much surviving discussion on the Darwin, outside of legacy / archived wiki articles and forum chat. Most of the attention is on the Mendel, which is fair enough as this was seen as a major improvement over Darwin. But I already have 2 bed slingers....

I have a ton of leftover parts from working on Ender printers and was thinking... how cool would it be to build a Darwin, using a modern extruder and electronics? I am imagining a 24v system with an E3D V6, geared extruder, and Klipper running from a Raspberry Pi I have sitting around. Heated bed as well. I think it would be an interesting experiment to see how capable the design is, given the advantage of a modern slicer and firmware.

I have most, if not all, of the electronics already in hand. Power supply, heated bed, Ender LCD display, Creality 4.2.2 mainboard, and many other parts as well. I would print the RP parts in ASA on my other printers... so it would mostly be a case of getting the threaded rods, smooth rods, misc. hardware, etc.

Let me know your thoughts. I would love to document this build, maybe make a Youtube series of the process. The only videos I could find are very short clips from the early days - nothing recent, showcasing the original Darwin in action.

... the Darwin had a stiffer frame, but more redundant parts ... the later ones were either more simply/faster to assemble or had "fancier" variations or other "more interesting" characteristics.

It's nothing wrong with the Darwin - it was the then most promising entry into the theme with high possibility to find most of the needed parts at your local stores ...

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Makes sense. I think it would be cool to revive this old design, will share models of the custom parts I need to design. Seems like 8mm rods / tube is inexpensive from Aliexpress. I suspect that print quality will be on par with any other basic cartesian printer, as Klipper's input shaping will be used to compensate for any frame vibrations.