Anyone tried to make a 3D Printer controller?

I’m working on a fully OSH board based around the STM32F411 with A5984 (32 micro step capable) stepper drivers. My plan is to use the aprinter firmware, which has a native stm32 port (only lightly tested with one of the discovery boards, so far), instead of Marlin. The board will also (optionally) mount on top of a CHIP for a clean, cheap and easy Octoprint experience.

I just completed the third rev test boards and they are on their way from OSHPark. Once I get a successful test board, I’ll be posting documentation and build out a roadmap. I’ve quite a few things planned, including a touch-screen menu and some form of wireless support.

Feel free to follow along at the GitHub repo: https://github.com/tetious/STMPS

Thanks

I’m now Watching your repo

@tetious can you maybe post pics od the board or schematics pf the ref c? Currently on my way out and got no time to fire up kicad, but would love tp take a look at them

If you want you can also take a look at my work. https://github.com/berryelectronics/ReST32 maybe we both can learn something from each other.

@strawberrymaker

Did you see this post

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1223&start=60#p17407

I suggested Gary should PM you regarding your hardware designs

RogerClark wrote:@strawberrymaker

Did you see this post

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1223&start=60#p17407

I suggested Gary should PM you regarding your hardware designs

Yes.

I mean Grey

(possibly auto correction or possible brain fade)

@tetious: Do you have any more details how to build and upload aprinter firmware on a STM32 board? I was looking for more details about aprinter firmware, but there are not many.

There is another example of using a NUCLEO-F411RE board together with a CNC shield V3 and Teacup firmware at http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?181,698882, a post made by Wurstnase. Sources are posted at https://github.com/Traumflug/Teacup_Fir … 2f411-port

sooo…got a bit pissed of that every of those 30 orders came here…except for the diodes…
so ordering them now locally, thats like a 1€ for each of these.

but well, finally get to finish the pcb

Soooo… finally got all of the parts and finished the soldering. suprisingly, its alive

Image

Image

Image

I think i managed to find out all of the faults, so these are going to get fixed ASAP. But i think its time to work on the Marlin port, so thats going to take some time. In the next few days i will atleast try all of the features out (Mosfets, stepper motors, reading out temperature, etc.)

~Straw

Excellent work.

hmmm….tales from the land of magic smoke:

check if the chip the chinese seller is actually the one you wanted.

because it seems like the 5V regulator wasnt really the one i ordered.
But luckily only that regulator blew and nothing else.

~Straw

Regulators are a common problem, I think some of them become firecrackers

Straw had done a great job. But I fear the greatness will fall if the firmware is not working as per hardware..
Any Idea how to Populate STM32F103xx with any 3D printer Firmware. If NXP chip was used we can easily port smoothy ware. But its STM32………

is this worth a try/…………
https://github.com/Rejdok/STM32-Marlin-Port

How’s this going?

STM did their own port of Marlin to the HAL for a demo board they also released:
http://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/s … 001v1.html

Source code:
https://github.com/St3dPrinter/Marlin4ST

I haven’t looked at it much, but saw it’s based in Marlin 1.1.0, so not too old.
Also it’s for an F4 MCU, but since it’s based on the HAL, shouldn’t be that hard to port to a different series.
And final comment, it’s probably not too hard to compare their code to the official 1.1.0 release to find out what changes they did, and bring them over to the latest 1.1.3 release.

I also believe the Marlin project has been trying to rewrite the code to have a HAL to use different MCUs (I think teensy and Due are their targets), so perhaps using the STM develeped code as a base to write a HAL for the F4 or even F1 series is possible.

Its ATM pretty much on hold for me. Had a different project comming up for me which seemed much more do-able from a software perspective than this.
thanks @victor_pv i might look into it if i find some time in the summer break and then we will see how it goes from there on

~Straw

i’m half way wondering how feasible is it to get those RAMPS boards and use them with STM32 F1 or F4 boards,
http://reprap.org/wiki/Arduino_Mega_Pololu_Shield
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=r … d&_sacat=0
those boards are rather ‘cheap’ on ebay (but do note that for most of the boards the Pololu modules are sold separately.)
the RAMPS boards are also mainly 5v boards, hence, some care may be necessary interfacing them
after getting the RAMPS boards and connecting them up with stm32 f1 or f4 boards, i’d guess we could start trying to port marlin
http://marlinfw.org/
to stm32?

imho those stm32f407 (black) vet6 boards make good candidates for 3dprinter controllers, lots of gpio pins, lots of functionalities on stm32f4 168 mhz stm32f4 processor 192k+4k sram 512k flash hardware fpu, it would likely make a *very fast* 3d printer which could do all those path computations in *floating point* on the fly
http://www.stm32duino.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1391

I think these purple board make good candidates too, because of their small footprint, although they lack some peripherals included in the black boards:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/STM32F4-Discove … Sw-CpYAiTn

The advantage on those is that I feel it would be easy to make a board that plugs either on top or under that without wasting much space.
I have been searching for the last few days for a good board with support for at least 3 extruders, and seem that the only one I kind of like is the rumba, but uses a avr.
There is a couple of commercial ones based on STM32, but with closed source (Mks Robin and geeetech gtm32).

Really wish someone would design the pcb to plug one of those F4 boards so we could then port the stm eval firmware to it, and then bring it up to the latest Marlin versions, which are adding already a HAL layer for the Due and the Teensy. I do not think DUE or Teensy are any better than an F407, and are definitely more expensive.

this repository seem a little ‘hot’
https://github.com/St3dPrinter/Marlin4ST
http://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/s … 001v1.html
^^ this is ST’s ‘own’ 3d printer board
somewhat pricy at $116
looking at the schematics they are using L6474 stepper drivers
http://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/ … 043117.pdf
rather than pololu stepper modules that may make porting it to a ‘generic’ board based on RAMPS/Pololu troublesome

then there is this Marlin for STM32F1
https://github.com/MakerLabMe/Marlin_STM32
but it seemed that it has not been followed up since about 3years back

The ST one is one I linked above too. That seems much more recent than the markelabme one, and is confirmed to work.
I even found someone posted in a forum saying they have been using that board with that fw successfully for a while.

I had a look at it, and the changes are not so big or so many. Among other things they changed the sdfat library to Elm-Chan’s one, which is the one ST includes in the HAL, but Greyman’s one works with our cores and is the one used in Marlin, so there is no need for changes in that part, we could revert them or keep Elm-Chan, not a big deal, but by adapting it to the Marlin official HAL way, it would allow to keep updating with the Marlin versions.

The board is definitely pricey though. Specially just for testing and getting the ball rolling.
Something in the style of RAMPS but to plug in one of the $10 boards should be much cheaper, and more flexible for future changes, or repairs in case something breaks.
I’m thinking on grabbing a RAMPS or one of these, can be used to test fw in an F4, and if I abandon the idea I can still use to extend the number of extruders in my current board:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-cnc … 00094.html

But I’m not even sure I have time to to invest on this. Haven’t been able to even catch up with new posts in the forum for weeks now.