Would it be a worth while upgrade to a Re-Arm Ramps running Smoothie? I’ve used a ramps in for my previous printers in the past. They have all been courtesan printers. With no experience in the 32 bit hardware and seemingly many Smoothie in here I am open to suggestions. It’s seems a cost effective upgrade.
I can contest it’s a good upgrade – as long as you don’t have a panel that you’re wanting to run? One of our members here blew his out trying to use some panel; who knows what panel, with what adapters, with what hardware…
But if you’re just using a standard ramps setup, it’s a very cost effective upgrade path.
Additionally @raykholo makes the Cohesion3D mini; it’s an $89 board which is really cheap for a smoothie.
I don’t have an issue with the Re-Arm, I have a serious issue with the RAMPS itself. By the time you buy a decent RAMPS and the Re-Arm you are well into the territory of just having a sleek and reliable Mini from @raykholo . I’ve seen his boards inside and out. They are good. The Ramps is just not up to par/ out of date to me.
personally - i cannot recommend the re-arm enough.
if you’ve already got a working! ramps board, it`s a really cheap and effective upgrade path to smoothie. and it is an upgrade - i was surprised to see the difference in movement speed and accuracy.
Worth it if you don’t want to spend too much on a controller upgrade, personally, I’d be more swayed for an all-in-one solution, like the Cohesion Mini. I have 3 printers running 32 hardware, the 4th is still running Marlin, one of the 32 bit printers is a Re-Arm, they’re good, but as Griffin pointed out, once you get that, the weak spot is then the RAMPS itself.