With the introduction to the diamond hot end tip. I would like to run smoothieboard due to 32BIT computing and amazing firmware. Or so I am lead to belive. However the smoothieboard only supports 5 steppers. Meaning 3 axis and two extruders. Is there a possibility to run 3 extruders? What kind of work am I looking at to do this?
I dont mind soldering a new board up, the only down side is I have never done SMD soldering.
Any help in this direction would be more than welcome.
-Bruno M.
Imported from wikidot
Hey.
I’ve been asked this three times already this week.
Here’s the short story : To control 3 extruders with a Smoothieboards, you only need to add one external stepper motor driver, which just requires wiring it to the Smoothieboard.
All the rest ( thermistor inputs, mosfet outputs ) you have enough of on-board. You just lack one stepper motor driver.
Then, here’s the thing : Smoothie currently only knows how to move one extruder at a time. Moving several at the same time would require changing the code a bit ( not much, but still some work ).
Cheers.
Hi,
I have a 5XC with external display (viki2) and external drivers for X, Y and Z. I feel like there is not enough output pins to control a 3rd extruder. Am I missing something ?
Yes, panels do use a lot of the pins …
<http://smoothieware.org/pinout>>> and <<<FLOATING LINK: http://smoothieware.org/lpc1769-pin-usage> are your friends here.
If you disable the 4 leds in config, you can use those pins. Also, you are probably not using the play/pause led and button pins, so you can use those too. The user-side I2C port would also give you two pins.
Cheers.
I have a Viki 2.0 and 3 Extruders, it can all be hooked up and programmed no problem.
I have not tested it yet (so far have only done single extruder jobs) but I can tell you with confidence that the 5Xc has enough pins for it.
You’ll have to disable the LED’s on the board through the config file and solder some header pins to the board