I’m planning on upgrading my hardware from unipolar motors and a hacked-together GRBL driver to a tinyG. I have a dual Y and I’d love to be able to address a 3d printer extruder as well. Since the TinyG only has 4 motor ports, how might I pull this off?
I am currently running a 4-axis hobbyCNC pro board but I’m running the dual Y axis on the same motor ouput (leaving my A axis free) however I’ve been having lots of trouble with the GRBL part communicating lately. A 3d printer extruder head would be bipolar, so I at least need a bipolar setup for that. If I stick with my current system for the X,Y,Z axis, could i add an additional serial port (either GRBL or tinyG) and control this frankenstein with Chilipeppr?
The hope is make the machine fully adjustable to be a CNC machine, 3D printer, or laser cutter. Any help would be appreciated!
I think you could use the A axis on the TinyG board as the controller for your extruder, but if you need to have PIDs for heaters for 3D printing you may want a standalone board or run some PIDs from an Arduino and control all of that through ChiliPeppr.
If you are mainly doing 3D printing then I think switching to a board that is focused on 3D printing may make more sense. If, instead, you are doing occasional 3D printing on the same machine, then I think you should frankenstein stuff together. That’s sort of how I have my setup. I do laser cutting with a 2.5W laser, as well as milling, but would also like to do some UV curable resin printing. It will all be off the same CNC machine so I’ll be like you duct-taping it all together inside ChiliPeppr with different widgets.
One other thing to consider is the TinyG2 which is firmware for the Arduino Due. It has XYZABC axes available. You can drive a Gshield and some standalone stepper controllers for the ABC.
If I frankenstein stuff I might end up with a GRBL and a tinyG or printrboard, and each axis might be wired to something different. Is there a way to do that in Chilipeppr?
The more I think of it, I don’t see many downsides to using a printrboard. It has 5 motors (can handle my X, dual Y, and Z) as well as an extruder motor output, and PIDs for hot-end and heated bed all built in. Would that work with Chilipeppr? Is there a reason more people aren’t using that board over the GRBL or tinyG for CNC (like limited current or something)?
I found this port of GRBL 0.7? for the printrboard: https://github.com/lincomatic/grbl and I have a printrboard (maybe fried…) laying around here somewhere. I’m going to slap it together and see what happens.
I was able to flash GRBL 0.7 to the printrboard, but that only uses 3 of the 4 axes available on that board. Is there a particular reason printrboard isn’t really used for other CNC stuff? It can handle up to 2A per winding while TinyG is more like 2.5A, but otherwise is there a particular reason it can’t be used with some gcode sender app or chilipeppr?