New Electronics Time. I think it's time to dip my toe in the 32

3D Printing
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New Electronics Time. I think it’s time to dip my toe in the 32 bit pond.
So, what are the choices? From what I can tell, they include:
ALL IN ONE BOARDS

  • Smoothie board
  • Reprap Pro Duet
  • Tiny G
  • Azteeg X5 mini
    SHEILDS
  • CRAMPS sheild on Beaglebone black
  • RAMPS-FD sheild on arduio Due
  • RADDS sheild on arduio Due

I’m currently leaning towards the RAMPS-FD as I can get it and an aduino DUE from China for a total price of ~$45 USD.
All of the non-sheild options will be at least twice the price because they have integrated stepper drivers and I don’t need that as I have a bunch of spare drivers. If the CRAMPS was readily available and a bit more mature, I’d be keen but there are no pre-built boards yet and I don’t have time/patience to build my own.
The main downside I can see for the DUE sheilds is lack of ethernet.

Any thoughts/advice/experience?
http://reprap.org/wiki/File:RAMPS-FD_v1A.JPG

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I’m currently using an older version TinyG for my Sherline CNC. The struggles I’m having with it wouldn’t apply to 3d printing (EMI basically) but the community support has been great.

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Put an azteeg into a rostock mini in ten minutes, had a minor issue with smoothieware, and the developer responded with a fix in another ten minutes. Fault my own, I copied a edge build config file and tried to load it on a master build firmware. Ordered in on a Friday, and got it on Sat.

Ordered a Smoothieboard on Friday, got it Monday… worked without issues and is a great improvement also. Must admit, I like the Smoothieboard better then the Azteeg. Ethernet possible right there, etc. Read the details!

Both use Smoothieware and have stepper drivers on board. Smoothie is 1/16th, Azteeg 1/32. Extruders supported, etc, varies, so check specs carefully. And you can always drive external extras, so do not feel locked into the design.

Most everything owes life to GRBL( https://github.com/grbl/grbl ) anyhow. Lots of coolio controller forks from that parent.

Smoothieware runs well to my needs so far. Supports motions with acceleration for all kinds of configurations. And is refreshed from the parent regularly, and the design goal was to use 32 bits and FP.

And I am still waiting my RAMPS-FD to arrive from China. So I suppose I need to just keep waiting for that. Perhaps next week.

Until then, all I can do is keep falling in love with Smoothieware… it replaces things in a plug and play way. But lets you tune it for the needs fast and easy. I was able to calibrate a Rostock Mini based build with the new firmware in about 10 minutes. Tweak it in memory, then save the config to SD.

And its quiet and smooth, does live up to the name. Specially in the complex wee details of tight corners, where your printer might have struggled before.

Cheers
James Hutchinson

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Just read a heap of forum posts and watched a couple videos it’s a hard decision between ramps-fd and radds. I like the radds more but the lockups mentioned on the forums concern me.

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Back when I thought the mega was choking on delta calculations I researched this and ramps-fd seemed best by far except for the price. Now that the price is down I say go for it.

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Be careful of anything ordered from China. The seller holds now responsibility for quality, evidently. I am talking about Chinese law. Also, counterfeits and child labor may be taking place. Some complaints on parts from China having bad solder jobs and such. If you do buy from China, make sure you buy from a link you got from repeat buyers or many reviews on.

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@NathanielStenzel I am no stranger to Chinese electronics - it is always a bit more risky but they live an die by positive feedback, so it’s easy to get replacements.

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@Matt_Kraemer if a processor dies on calculations, the programmer would have failed when trying to write Wolfenstein 3D. That game is old now, but it pulled off a lot of excellence with look up tables and cheap tricks. A programmer that fails at making do fails at programming.

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@NathanielStenzel I’ve lost the plot, what are you talking about? processor wasn’t dying just seemingly too slow and causing jittering movements in the hot end. In the end the cause was resonance in the belts as measured by accelerometer.

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@Matt_Kraemer I was basically suggesting that you can precompute or estimate so much in programming that the CPU speed does not really matter.

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Ah yes, but not 400 sqrt operations inside messy functions per second. @Tim_Rastall refers to it as “bananas math”

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you’ve left the 4pi off the list. though the lack of good firmware support makes me think other boards may be better, it also really needs some caps as filters.

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@Tim_Rastall Do not forget the firmware part.
IMHO the tinyg firmware is miles ahead of the other arm firmware versions and the others are not improving the motion part. I do not know if tinyg has support for 3d printers.
The other firmware versions are just grbl derivatives. (Just like the current avr firmware versions)
And I think we should add more safety features to the hardware. The hardware you mentioned is unsafe. (Single fault conditions can make the printer unsafe)

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@erik_vdzalm I agree that Tiny G looks to have the most cutting edge firmware developments,case in point (https://www.flickr.com/photos/rileyporter/13988054029/) Sadly, they are so cutting edge that I have only heard anecdotally that someone has got one actually printing rather than running a CNC mill. For me, part of the decision is about having something that will work without endless tweaking, firmware updates etc.

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I’m quite happy with the RAMPS-FD boards I built myself, but I have been very disappointed with the RAMPS-FD boards built by geeetech (and resold by every man and his dog). Not just very poorly built, with cheap components, crap solder, bent pins, wonky connectors, but also broken tracks on the PCB. I’m pleased to see my design being manufactured, but I couldn’t recommend such poorly made boards. They are very cheap though !

I would consider RADDS as an alternative to RAMPS-FD, but I have not tried one myself.

There are some Due variants with ethernet, but not as cheap.

The BeagleBone Black options are powerful - but getting into Linux/EMC is not an easy path for Linux novices! BBB recently took a jump in price and is not so easy to find in stock.

Smoothieboard is I think the best of the current bunch, good quality boards at a reasonable price, and an active community.