Can anyone recommend an electronics board that supports 4 extruders?
While I don’t know of any board that supports that many extruders (madness!) , it would be quite easy to make an add-on board for e.g. a RAMPS to fit the extra components. But I must ask: what firmware are you going to use?
Azteeg x3 with the new 1.1 shield supports 4 extruders if I recall correctly. Looking at the pictures, parts of it seem to be labeled H-end 3 and H-end 4, so I’m pretty sure that’s the case.
As @ThantiK said, azteeg x3 with 1.1 shield supports 4 extruders, where 2 uses thermocuples. >If you choose that board, make sure to document everything and share it 
@Rene_Elias check the x3. The thing that haves the name printed, is the shield. The v1.1 haves a few screw type terminals, thats the one that support 4 extruders.
@Rob_Giseburt would be good to ask…
@Thomas_Sanladerer Madness yes, but a certain Hot-end manufacturer is prototyping a 4 nozzle HE and I’m interested in what the electornics support is for 4 extruders/heaters might be :). From my perspective, I can see use for 3 nozzles:
1 small diameter perimeter,
2. larger diameter infil
3. supports.
Thanks to everyone else for your responses, I’ll look into the suggestions.
Does anyone else see the need to move /away/ from single board towards modular solutions? E.g. why not have one board that manages one axis; communicating (sideways if you like) with other boards for coordination of timing.
@James_Newton , I’m sure lots of people would love a board with thermistor, mosfet, stepper driver, power select (jump from previous, or standalone), kinda like the extrudrboard from printrbot.
@ThantiK , @James_Newton
That’s the way of the RepRap/Makerbot “Gen3” hardware. It was a DC motor driver instead of a stepper motor driver, but the EC (Extruder Controller) was responsible for all of the extruder functions. That was in the Cupcake and drove a lot of early Mendel designs.
On Gen4 (Thing-O-Matic) they moved the extruder to a stepper driven directly from the MB, but still had a separate EC for temperature management. It had some other abilities too, like DC motor and fan control.
Ok, so on a vaguely related topic, is anyone aware of work on solutions that use only 1 motor to drive several filaments (1 filament at a time) with a servo/solenoid actuated selection mechanism? Seems inefficient to use 3 steppers and 3 drivers on a 3 nozzle rig when 2 are always going to be idle. I figure this would need changes to firmware to accommodate for this while using existing I/O on the electronics to drive servos/solenoids. Mechanically, I was thinking of a wades style extruder with 3 hobbed grooves in the bolt and 3 servo actuated idlers each aligned to a corresponding groove.
@Tim_Rastall there’s a project which uses 2 stepper motors to drive 3+ filament drivers. It uses a cam system to engage the idler.
It could practically be extended for any number of numbers of filaments if you absolutely wanted.
There’s a patent for using both sides of the same push wheel, with clamping idlers on each side. This way, turning the motor one way extruder one filament, and reversing which of the idlers is under pressure allows the motor to push the other filament when reversed.
I believe it’s Dimension that holds that one. The MakerBot Mk7 or up wouldn’t be hard to convert to that.
@ThantiK Huh, I had a cam actuated version option in my head too. This one looks like a winner.