Anyone tried to make a 3D Printer controller?

I’m not aware of anyone having done this.

I think what you are suggesting is to make a ramps board that connects to a STM32 board, e.g. put a socket in the middle of the RAMPs board and plug a STM32 board into that socket rather than plug the RAMPS into a Mega 2560

I’m not sure how may pins you need and whether the Maple mini or most generic STM32F103C boards would have enough pins for this

You may need to use a small STM32F103VET board instead, as it would definitely have enough pins.

The other consideration is of course the voltage levels, as I’m not sure if the POLO stepper drivers can be controlled by 3.3V (you’d need to check)

@RogerClark Just checked the drv8825 drivers. their threshhold for high signal is 2.2-5.5V, so thats no issue. a4988 is also no issue, but i think ill rather test that.
Something ramps style was also my first thought, with the maple board plugged on the top side.
There shouldnt be any problem with pinout, as the ramps basically just uses ~24 pins. there could be a problem when using lcd, sd card or something else.

For me, this seems as an bit easier project than the ultimate dev board *cough* *cough*

with an vet6 board this could end up like something really crazy. but also an idea. guess i add one in my next order ^^

Well, i’ll take a look at the weekend. but i have to check if atleast marlin is directly compatible with the maple/stm32.

~straw

RogerClark wrote:
The other consideration is of course the voltage levels, as I’m not sure if the POLO stepper drivers can be controlled by 3.3V (you’d need to check)

The stepper drivers will definitely work with 3.3V. I have a modified RAMPS here that runs with an Arduino Due without problems on 3.3V, dicussed here. And there are several other 32-bit controllers which also use 3.3V electronics. The big discussion is rather about driving the MOSFETs with only 3.3V. But if you’re going to design a new board, it’s easy to add an additional transistor to drive the MOSFET gates at a higher voltage.

Ok, a short list of Things :
-5 Stepper Driver (15 Pins)
-6 Buttons for Min. & Max. (6 Pins)
-3 Thermistors (3 Pins)
-2 Hotend (2 Pins)
-3 Fans, 2 for Hotend + 1 for Driver (3 Pins)
-1 Heatbed (1 Pin)

That way I basically end up with no Pin left, fits perfectly .

Working on a schematic now.

~Straw

Woudn’t it be good to have some additional pins left for adding some kind of display adapter and an SD-Card reader?

This would of course mean going to some larger STM32 board, such as e.g. this one, as already proposed by Roger. But given that you will be putting a lot of time and effort into this, it might be worth while.

Guess I’ll have to wait for the next delivery. I could take a look at the firmware for it in the mean time. I don’t think that any firmware will run native on it

~Straw

Hmm…… Just thought about an addon : using a ili9341 screen with touch, but instead of driving it with the main controller (the vet6 board), driving it with a seperate baite maple mini which is sending gcode to the board and acting like an host controller (maybe with the esp8266). As im not quite sure how hard the vet6 is going to work for the actual controlling and if it going to slow down that hard if its driving the display.

~Straw

Good morning

There are news? I am particularly interested in this project for some time that I try to document me.
I am listening.

Drk

@Drakelive
Im going to start it next week, as im on vacation currently and ive got like 2 weeks time then, plenty i hope. thinking about putting th chip directly on the board instead of using a dev board, its like 7$ cheaper (but its maype bit harder for beginners to solder) maybe it will be a option to choos from, either onboard chip or devboard.

but ill post more updates in the following week, have to see bit more of italy ATM

straw

strawberrymaker wrote:@Drakelive
Im going to start it next week, as im on vacation currently and ive got like 2 weeks time then, plenty i hope. thinking about putting th chip directly on the board instead of using a dev board, its like 7$ cheaper (but its maype bit harder for beginners to solder) maybe it will be a option to choos from, either onboard chip or devboard.

but ill post more updates in the following week, have to see bit more of italy ATM

straw

Actually i wanted to look at the hardware site first and then work on the software porting of marlin. Would actually like to see the work you get done. AFAIR there was a problem with some library.
Away again till next week
~Straw

strawberrymaker wrote:Actually i wanted to look at the hardware site first and then work on the software porting of marlin. Would actually like to see the work you get done. AFAIR there was a problem with some library.
Away again till next week
~Straw

I had a poor attempt a few years ago,
Please excuse the crudeness of it all, I don’t get much free time these days.
https://github.com/simonantonio/Ithika/ … -Rough.pdf

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Managed to make something out of the project, some small features missing, but these should be solved in a few days. But it will be reaaally hard to fit everything on 10×10 Board. Elsewise i have to go bit bigger, which would be a bummer. Or remove like one Extruder.

~Straw

Hi

Great work @Strawberrymaker !!!!!!

To start, we need a simple card. This is essential for us to start writing a firmware and test it on a 3D printer.
So, I believe that we need this:

a) 4 Motor Driver (X, Y, Z, E)
b) 6 EndStop
c) 2 Thermistors (Hot-End, bed)
d) 2 Power outputs PWM (Hot-End, bed)
e) 2 UART
f) 1 (SPI More CS)
g) 1 EEPROM (Microchip 24LC1025 or smaller )

Regard
drk

glad to see you found the sd card variant of the board, i’m fairly sure it may well have 24cxx on it or there is another variant with one and sdcard, might even be one with a spi flash on it as well. look for a zet version as well

lcd might be interesting as from its pin labelling its wired on the fsmc, also not figured where all the devices are connected to address wise

stephen

@Drakelive

Nice Idea, something simpler. Would be bit hard with a C8T6, but should be easily with something like a ret6. Wouldnt it be better to move the EEPROM part to the IC itself? Havent played with the STM32duino EEPROM Library yet, saving some pennies, making it more approchable, or something like these cheap atmel eeproms.

but well, i will take a look at it

For EEPROM, I’ve tried several libraries, but this one seem to be a good one : https://github.com/JChristensen/extEEPROM
There is also SPI Flash libraries, I’m currently using this one : https://github.com/LowPowerLab/SPIFlash
I’ve even submitted a PR for Cypress FRAM support (you can see it there in github), but it is not merged yet …

strawberrymaker wrote:@Drakelive

Nice Idea, something simpler. Would be bit hard with a C8T6, but should be easily with something like a ret6. Wouldnt it be better to move the EEPROM part to the IC itself? Havent played with the STM32duino EEPROM Library yet, saving some pennies, making it more approchable, or something like these cheap atmel eeproms.

but well, i will take a look at it