X5 adding stepper motor output for extruder

Controllers Smoothie
1

Is there a way to add another stepper output to be used for an addition extruder?

I’m currently building my own delta printer and saw Thomas Sanlanderer’s live stream recently with him installing a smoothie board to an Atom 2.0.

I want to use a diamond tri extruder with the printer that I’m building.
I’m planning on using a heated bed with it.

if there is a module that I can add on, it would be ideal, but if I have to put together one, I don’t mind the work, I would need some sort of instruction though.

Imported from wikidot

2

Which board do you have exactly ?

Using an external stepper driver is as simple as routing a few wires from the driver to free GPIO pins on your board : http://smoothieware.org/general-appendixes#external-drivers

Note if you have a diamond, color mixing is not supported at the moment, you will only be able to move one extruder at a time.

3

Thanks, I don’t have a board yet.
I’m planning on getting a smoothieboard X5.
I was looking at the BBP 1s, because of it’s 7 stepper motor outputs, but looking at their indiegogo page, it seems that they took the money and disappeared, from reading some of the backer’s comments.

4

So looking at the link, from what I can tell, the pins mentioned seem to be the same IO pins/connections as the M1, M2 …. connections for using a separate driver.
Is this correct or are they separate IO pins from those?

Because for what I want to do, I would need 6 stepper motor outputs.

5

3 for each axis and 3 for extruders.
x
y
z
extruder 1
extruder 2
extruder 3

6

You can use any pin on the board to control stepper motor drivers. You just need two pins ( step and dir ) for a drive.
The on-board drivers breakout their pins, but there are also “free” ( un-used ) GPIO pins broken out on the board.
See http://smoothieware.org/pinout
You definitely can run 6 steppers no problem.

7

Thanks, that helps a lot.
I’ll be ordering one with in the week.
As soon as I get it, I’ll cnc a daughter board for it… unless there are already breakout boards for it.

8

most stepper drivers don’t require anything like a daughter board, just basic wiring

9

I figured. I just want to make one for ease of install and maintenance. After dealing with my other 2 printers, I don’t want to deal with the nest of wires that usually happens.