UBW32 Blue Banana Electronics

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UBW32 Blue Banana Electronics

Release status: Experimental

Bbanana.jpg
Description
RepRap Electronics based on PIC32MX460F512L
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Author
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After some serious time invested in testing different ways to go about new electronics for RepRap I finally decided to go with PIC32MX460F512L as a base for my board. One of the reasons for this decision is that UBW32 board is readily available, is open source and it has this mcu sitting there. Main reason why I decided to go with PIC32MX and not ARM Cortex M3 as I initially believed is that even Cortex M3 has some interesting features (like 7 DMA channels) the main thing mcu need to do is bit-bang the pins to drive steppers and this is something PIC is just faster then Cortex M3. Other important reason is that I just have more experience with PICMX32 then with ARM. I had serious issues to make all my tools (JTAG, Compiler, IDE) work properly under Linux and I was unable to make them work at all on OSX while with new MPLAB-X from Microchip IDE and C32 compiler from Microchip works like a charm on all Windows (tested on win7 ultimate 64bit), Linux (tested on Fedora 13 64bit) and OSX (tested on 10.6 Snow Leopard).

The ideas (for now) is to have have firmware that is compatible (but not limited to) BFB PCB and that will also know how to talk both with skeinforge and netfabb (possibly reprap host too). I will try to make bus-board single layer (semi printable) but it is not primary goal. UBW32 already comes with bootloader so no special tools are needed to update firmware and the board has standard .1" raster so it is easy to work with.

With regards to hardware the bus-board is the main "product" here. It will have socket for UBW32 board and:

  • socket for pololu stepper drivers
  • header for stepper drivers (so you can attach some other stepper driver board)
  • input header (for the 8 button interface)
  • output header (for the OLED or 20x4 HD44780 or Nokia 3310 display's)
  • bus header (for the IO extension - Ethernet, BT, XBee ...)


FILE ID# TYPE DESCRIPTION AVAILABLE FORMATS CREATED/RESERVED BY
UBW32.firmware_mal.mplabx.tar.gz basic project UBW32 Firmware 1.4 modified to compile under MPLAB-x (not reprap related yet) File:UBW32.firmware mal.mplabx.tar.gz --Bogdan Kecman 201011140606