Which one is better, Anet/Melzi vs RAMPS? And why?
Melzi board has everything soldered to the board, and supports only 4 steppers. A RAMPS is modular, step sticks plugged into the ramps which is plugged into an arduino mega. ramps also supports upto 5 steppers.
From my experience of cheap 3d printer boards, and how they fail, it can be cheaper in the long run to use a RAMPS setup, as when something inevitably breaks/burns out you can swap parts out instead of replacing the whole board.
neither. get a 32bit board.
I agree with @Phillip_Ramirez . Take a look at http://cohesion3d.com.
Thank you @Justin_Mitchell for your explaination, how about the printing quality?
Anybody running that board U was also looming at the RAMBo board
No fundamental difference, same cpu, same stepper motor drivers. with the RAMPs board you can switch things out fromt he standard though, there are some subtly different stepper drivers you could fit, you can also fit more advanced 32-bit arduino-mega compatible controllers too. but none of those things make the quality inherently different
Ok cool guess the assumption i have printing faster and better quality with a 32bit board v.s the 8bit board…
In my experience any lack of speed/quality for 3d printing has not been for lack of cpu power, usually physics becomes the problem way before you hit that point, the mass of the hotend carriage puts definite limits on acceleration and speed, and theres only so fast you can melt and squeeze out plastic and get a good finish out of it, plus a large mass wiggling about creates vibration and shake. all of which directly influence the quality of the finish.
There are of course times when you do need more processing grunt, some of the newer work in having the controller compensate in software for non-level beds - the so called auto-levelling, or for laser cutting where you are rasterising an image and pwm modulating the laser whilst its flying about at 500mm/s, those need a faster cpu. There are various boards aroudn that will run software like smoothieware. eg. the cohesion3d boards, or the re-ARM for RAMPS board, and im sure there are many others
Yes thnx Justin Mitchell just honestly comes down to preference just trying to find that middle ground ya know…decent board that won’t break the bank…and be around for awhile…
8-bit is fine for simple cartesian printers. Deltas can use them but their isn’t enough CPU left over to also reliably run a full graphics LCD. CoreXY’s should be able to use them, but their speeds are capped.
Long term though, 32-bit processors are cheaper and more powerful. While 8-bit is still adequate, people will eventually be transitioning to 32-bit boards with built-in networking, web hosting, etc…
As for the difference between a socketed stepper driver (RAMPS) versus an on-board stepper driver, the chips are normally intended to be cooled via mounting on the board. So they should run cooler (presumably) on the melzi board versus a RAMPS board.
Anyone know about Zonestar board?? Is it better? Cuz it looks more expensive but I dont know about it’s quality…missing/deleted image from Google+
If you are looking at sub-50 dollar boards, 8-bit is fine. At a 100+ though, time to switch to 32-bit imo.
I’m agree with you, bigger bit, better detail on quality… But I’m going to make my own printer so I have to choose the main board first before collecting another parts… help me decide… or give me your recommended board…