Smoothieboard launched on KS

[www.kickstarter.com]

Cool -- I've been interested in this project as it's quite ambitious. I think it will be quite an excellent setup for 3d printers. It seems that the most attention has been given to those machines. A divergence from overpriced, underpowered 8-bit ATmega chips is certainly overdue there.

I do question the ability to operate "large CNC" machines. I doubt you'd have much success hooking up large stepper motors to those drivers. I'm only loosely familiar with LinuxCNC, but it seems most CNCs operate via parallel port and don't ship gcode to the controller. I think part of the reason is that interactions over USB between the PC and controller are not realtime -- which may be dangerous in some situations.

Also I'm curious how smoothie handles modulation of lasers and spindle speed control. Does it require additional daughter boards -- anybody know?

All in all, looks nice. I'd like one at least for my printer.

With the proper selection of motors (and windings), I wouldn't thing there would be a problem using the Smoothie board with larger (e.g. Bridgeport sized) CNC machines. The main problem with the G-code residing on the controller board is that CNC machining tends to be much more interactive than 3D printing (ie, starting and stopping execution, feed rate overrides). If they put the proper hooks in to allow this level of user interaction over the serial port, it should work well for CNC machining.

I dunno -- the bridgeport at work has some pretty beefy NEMA 42 steppers. I'm not even sure I'd use a gecko g540 on those. I think allegro drivers tend to tap out on mid-sized NEMA 23s. They're probably best for mini mill applications.

It'll pretty much run any stepper motor that need up to 2 amps, and even then with the current limiting it just means a slight torque reduction

I've got 4 of these boards currently in printers and they run 24/7, they pretty much haven't been powered down since the day i installed them, one is a Hbot using the corexy module in smoothie , the other one is a converted up! which is currently offline because the extruder mechanism is unreliable by design, and the other two are production printers which don't stop running

---

-=( blog )=- -=( thingiverse )=- -=( 3Dindustries )=- -=( Aluhotend - mostly metal hotend)=--=( Facebook )=-

I took another look at the Smoothie board driver specs. I was thinking it was a 3A+ driver at 36v. With 2A at 24v, you are better more in the range of a mini-mill.

Backed...

Good for Arthur. I have gerbers and a complete BOM ready to go to Seeed for prototypes but held off and started on RAMBo instead because I hadn't heard what was happening with the project. Being it's his own firmware I didn't want to have something might not get back up and running. It's a proven platform and it looks like he'll have enough capital once it funds to start production again.

Hi all !

Yay, Kickstarter !

About driving big machines, I have been driving my chinese 6040 CNC Router ( with big NEMA23 stepper drivers ) using a smoothieboard and CW5045 drivers. Using external drivers work fine. If you don't want to pay stepper drivers you won't use, you can get the 3X version of smoothieboard, which has less stepper drivers and mosfets. It's cheap and will work great for a CNC mill ( with external drivers ).

Example of Smoothie running a CNC router

About Spindle control we have nothing coded there, it should just require a RS485 breakout board.
Lasers on the other hand do work great, been using smoothie on my lasercutter for more than a year, others have too.

If you have any questions I'll be around

Please help spread the word about the Kickstarter on social media and around you, it'll help a lot !

Quick update : 

We have gotten incredible returns so far : we are 75% funded in less than two days !

Thanks a lot to everybody that has backed the project, and those that have talked about it, it helps a lot !

Fully funded !

Thank you everybody, this is awesome !!!!

Arthur and Mark,

With all the recent advances in all metal hi-temp hotends, are there any plans to include thermocouple inputs on board and not as a optional module?

Dave

Yes, I heard people in the community talking about it recently, I wouldn't even be surprised if somebody did it but did not contribute it.

If you hop in on the IRC channel you could catch the people involved I think.

So it's planned, and maybe already done