So I have an old generation one tri-colour mendal printer, that's never worked.

3D Printing
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1

So I have an old generation one tri-colour mendal printer, that’s never worked. I built it just fine, but when the time came around to wire up the second Melzi board, I just couldn’t get the wiring correct according to the voltmeter test (readings not coming out as the instructions said they should), then life happened and it’s a few years later and I have now come back to the printer. after trying to re-wire it from scratch, I have found that neither Melzi board is behaving properly in either the master or slave role, and to be quite honest, would love to just ditch them and buy a single board to control the printer. The question is, which board? I’ve done some cursory investigation, and can’t seem to see any that would support a triple extruder cartesian printer.

TL;DR got gen 1 tri colour mendal hardware and no controller board, please help D:

What I’m basically looking for is a single board that can support the following:
1 X X stop
1 X Y stop
1 X Z stop
1 X X stepper motor
1 X Y stepper motor
2 X Z stepper motor wired together in parallel
3 X extruder steppers
3 X 40mm fan
3 X 100k thermistors
1 X 10k thermistor (bed)
3 X heater cartridges
1 X heated Bed (not too sure of the specs on it :S )

Steppers are Nema 17’s

I suspect I may also need a power supply for it, but the existing one offers outputs as follows
3 X +12V 20A
3 X -12V 20A

I would really appreciate any help anyone can offer on this, as the printer was expensive back in the day, and something I’ve wanted to get working ever since have first heard about them being developed

2

Smoothy/printrboard with a extruder extension.

3

Maybe Azteeg?

4

Due+RADDS will fit the bill nicely. It has six stepper sockets, four thermistors, and five assignable outputs for heaters or fans in addition to the high-power heatbed output. Can run Repetier, Marlin4Due, or RepRapFirmware. http://reprap.org/wiki/File:Verkabelung-RADDS.jpg

5

Oh, and Repetier has some nice new color-mixing features… Repetier+RADDS will probably be the easiest mainstream board option for you.

6

Thanks for the help guys, really appreciate it, will look into these :smiley:

7

@Ryan_Carlyle RADDs is certainly looking like the answer I’ve been looking for and thank you for pointing it out to me. The only thing that concerns me is the number of high current loads (6), but with three hot ends, three fans and a heated bed, will I need to employ any fancy wiring (like running the extruder fans in parallel or something)? Just to clarify, the fans are like on the E3D V6, where they’re cooling the hotends, and not the print, and each one is needed to protect the print head carriage from melting.

8

For multiple hot end fans, I would just wire them all straight to the PSU (in parallel) so they always run.