I’m a huge cheerleader for this project; not because anyone asked me to be, but because I believe that as many people should be on 32 bit control boards as possible. Especially if you’re on a Delta. If you’ve already got an old 3D printer that’s on a MEGA/RAMPS setup, this board is awesome. I did receive a review unit to help work out some bugs, and test things to ensure modification went smoothly, and it did. Smoothieware also now has quite a few end users, and very dedicated developers.
Once you get the configuration files, you’ll wonder how you ever dealt with configuration.h and its jumbo mess of things. Smoothie is crazy easy to make that second extruder drive act as a second Z/Y/X motor driver, pullups are as easy as appending ^, pulldowns append v (get it? Arrows up and down!), it’s just awesome for nearly any kind of setup you can use. You do have to be aware of the 5v/3v3 differences though, but in most cases, 5v stuff will work at 3v3.
Originally shared by HACKADAY
When it comes to 3D printer controllers, there are two main schools of thought. The first group is RAMPS or RAMBo which are respectively a 3D printer controller ‘shield’ for the Arduino Mega and a stand-alone controller board. These boards have been the… http://hackaday.com/2016/11/14/new-part-day-smoothie-for-ramps
I backed the KS, just a couple $ as I do not need a board right now. Exciting stuff. Smoothie is much much easier to work with than Marlin, hands down.
@Panayiotis_Savva I think I have yet to meet a single person who has extensively used modern 32bit single-build firmware (Smoothie or RepRapFirmware) and still prefers Marlin. Most people just use Marlin by default. You’ll need to make the poll more like:
Marlin, just because that’s what I’m used to / came with my printer
Marlin, which I prefer after having tried other firmwares
Smoothieware
Repetier
RepRapFirmware
Sailfish
Redeem
MachineKit
Other
Note that Sailfish is the second most popular firmware after Marlin… doesn’t mean we should be porting it to 32bit either. The old AVR-based control code is filled to the brim with hacks and kludges to get realtime motion control to work on an 8bit processor. Porting that kruft to a fast processor is silly.
Marlin is already available in 32bit via Marlin4Due, but it never caught on, for various good reasons. That was a relatively easy port because the Due (SAM3X8E) can be programmed via the Arduino IDE. Getting a build environment set up for the Smoothie processor LPC17xx is an entirely different story.
Agree with Ryan: Having used Sailfish, Marlin, Repetier, and now RepRap Firmware, RRF is sooo much easier to deal with than the spaghetti that is Marlin. I can see no reason to ever go back to it.
I agree with Ryan too: I switched from ramps + repetier to Alligator board + RRF and its like assembly vs Java! Forget about recompiling for any quirk and poking eprom values.
I really think you should see how much work had gone into the new Marlin.
There had been huge leaps in the development of the spaghetti into modular and structured code.
Just look at the planner to get an idea.
The new unified bed leveling will be much easier, and the fragmentation is slowly disappearing.
More languages are being supported, and more hardware.
The team developing Marlin is top notch. They have taken Marlin to the next level. Just try it.
I am pushing to have Marlin support 32 bit processors, as you all know the advantages of doing so.
The routines in Marlin are optimised to support the 8bit processors, imagine how it will perform on 32 bit.
Smoothieware is also awesome and no doubt I will have a second printer solely on Smoothieware. @Arthur_Wolf and team have done a great job, and I’m certainly supporting both Firmware efforts.
@Matt_Miller well that ain’t nice. Just because you don’t like it does not mean it should go away. There are many people that still like and use marlin. Prusa for example who make excellent printers.
@Pieter_Koorts I’m not saying it should die, but rather that we should allow it to die as superior firmwares are released. No one drives a team of horses to work daily now, that would be silly in a world of cars. Makes zero sense to port Marlin when clearly better firmwares already exist.
I mean I’m not going to say that Marlin should stop active development, but I much prefer developing on a 32 bit processor for my stuff. I don’t think having marlin work on both 8bit and 32bit is a great idea, personally.
This is just my 2 cents though because I’ve seen and have been a part of some very emotional discussions and development on both sides of this.
Marlin should not, under any circumstances support both 8bit and 32bit. There are so many hacks to inch out every bit of processing power and memory on marlin, that would no longer be required on a 32bit board.
To move everyone to 32bit A few things are required, and this board is one of them. Cheap and viable alternatives to 8 bit boards are necessary. My personal goal is $60, or $40 at 1k units. I’ve made a few designs towards that goal. One cost reduction measure is a mandatory requirement of 24v power supplies. Higher voltage = less current, which means smaller cheaper connectors and smaller boards.
