Firmware and printing speed

Hello guys,

I was wondering, how does the FIRMWARE effect the printing speed?
Anyone here dealt alot with the firmwares and knows the best firmware for printing speed? if so then please let me know what are the bottle necks.

My question here will really help me getting started with a newer (hopefully faster, better and cheaper) hardware set for reprap that im doing for fun-purposes only!

Looking forward for your reply guys!
Also anything else that you think effects the speed of hte printing.. feel free to drop it here!

-Joe

The influence of firmware on printing speed is small. Mostly, because they all have the same (limited) feature set. All do acceleration, so you can achieve high speeds. About all do jerk-type look-ahead, so you can get around corners without full stop. None of them does jerk-less cornering. EMC/EMC2/Mach3 are exceptions from the latter, but don't run on typical RepRap electronics.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Basically what im trying to do is create the hardware itself. meaning that i will remove myself from the MCU (atmega / arm) limitations.

What i plan to do is get a good FPGA board (maybe also connect it to labview / matlab for monitoring) and i will design the hardware from scratch - i.e create a seperate hardware model that will control the printer -- this way we can parallelize everything.
With the typical MCUs you get the problem of the MCU being busy doing things while the hardware is waiting.. this can be solved by:
1- running an OS system on the MCUs and enabling threads.
2- Using more than one MCU (2 arduino boards) - but that will make the costs go up.
3- creating the hardware itself (FPGAs) - with the costs of the FPGAs today, the prices will be kept low!
4- anything else? please suggest

Ofcourse im planning to use different ICs along with the FPGA such as 555 or (sin wave ICs) that will help controling the stepper motors (they generate a rather accurate sin waves which will get the operation of the stepper motors much much better and more accurate!)

What do you think about this ?

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With the typical MCUs you get the problem of the MCU being busy doing things while the hardware is waiting.

There are wait times, but they're not a problem. For example, after a step is done, you have to wait for the next one, freeing time to handle G-code parsing or heater controls.

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1- running an OS system on the MCUs and enabling threads.

The point of an operating systems ist to abstract hardware. This favours programming, but takes precious CPU cycles. For example, a typical OS switches threads every 10 milliseconds. 10 ms are an eternity if your stepper motor asks for 20'000 step pulses per second (evenly spaced in time, of course).

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Ofcourse im planning to use different ICs along with the FPGA such as 555 or (sin wave ICs) that will help controling the stepper motors

Make sure you can run at least 3 stepper motors synchronous at different speeds. That is, when moving from 0, 0, 0 to 10, 8, 3, all three steppers have to hit their target at the exactly same time.

Oh, and then there's curved movement, changing motor speeds while moving ...

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Thanks Traumflug, i will definately have to do alot of testing and research for this