Smoothieboard with full color LCD and touch screen

Controllers Smoothie
1

Hi everyone, I have a few questions about the lcd Interface of the smoothieboard.

The project I’m currently working on will be finished soon, and as my next one I chose 3D printing. I love playing around with electronics so it’s more about playing with the hard and software than owning a ‘complete ready to go’ printer.
So I ordered a cheap delta printer from china and want to continuously upgrade it. One of the first things I want to do is changing the RAMPS board to a smoothieboard and attaching a raspberry (octo-)pi.

Now to my question: I noticed that most 3d printer boards have a quite unresponsive lcd, or to be more precise it feels quite unresponsive with just very few fps. My idea was to extend the setup with a fast teensy board and a color display with touchscreen (I already have these components). The problem of course is the interface. What method would you recommend to interface the smoothieboard and my teensy or even the octo pi and the teensy. My intension is to program the teensy my self; I want to design a (hopefully pretty) UI including:
Current temperatures, position, Remaining time
Controls for pause, stop, resume, move axis, change temperatures

To achieve this I would need some sort of api to the smoothieboard or the octopi which doesn’t affect the printing performance.

I haven’t started on anything, I’m just gathering ideas and concepts before I invest time and money on this project.

Any feedback or ideas are very appreciated.

Ps.: here is a demo video of the speed of teensy with an lcd: (deleted) I can’t paste links so a youtube search for “Display Optimization Demo” should get you a video where an arduino is compared to a teensy with a full color lcd

Imported from wikidot

2

Hey.

So I ordered a cheap delta printer from china and want to continuously upgrade it. One of the first things I want to do is changing the RAMPS board to a smoothieboard and attaching a raspberry (octo-)pi.

Octopi is likely your fastest track to a good responsive touch interface right now.

Now to my question: I noticed that most 3d printer boards have a quite unresponsive lcd,

That’s going to be much less true for Smoothie than for 8-bit controllers ( we have a lot more power ).

My idea was to extend the setup with a fast teensy board and a color display with touchscreen (I already have these components).

That sounds a lot like the PanelDue if you’ve never heard of that.

The problem of course is the interface. What method would you recommend to interface the smoothieboard and my teensy or even the octo pi and the teensy

You just connect to it via Serial, and send Gcodes, is the simplest and best method.

You might also want to take a look at this project : https://github.com/arthurwolf/fabrica aimed at android tablets

Cheers.

3

Thank you very much, I will look into these options. Shortly after I sent my post I found out about PanelDue. Im currently reading through the github page for it but so far it look like exactly what I was looking for. I guess I will dig through the code over the next few days.

Thanks for your help.