Have a TinyG and Beaglebone, is there a standard device for heatbed and hot end only???

Hi, I am building my first 3D printer so I bought a frame kit for a Prusa Mendel i2 from Reprapuniverse.com, but of course, that only brings the mechanical part of the whole. I did that because I already happen to own a TinyG and a BeagleBone Black. My question then is: is there a standard device with only the power mosfets for the heating parts of the 3D printer? Do you see any problems with this approach or should I just buy a RAMPS 1.4 or something else?

Thanks in advance,
Daniel

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/12/2014 12:50PM by danielpepo.

I think the TinyG could handle the motion part just fine, but the you might off-load the temperature stuff to the beaglebone. You might be able to write a reasonably simple program that controls the temperatures and translates 'E' words to 'A' words on the fly, and drive the TinyG with pretty standard G-code.

Maybe you could even make TinyG parse E words into A-axis words with one line around [github.com]

A logic-level protected MOSFET like from [reprap.org] should cover what you need on the power side, while on the sensing side you need only a thermistor and a pullup resistor to one of the analog inputs.


If separating Gcode for the heaters from the motion control might be more work than you want to do, you might buy a hardware PID controller and SSR and control the temperature manually. Or go for something from the List of Electronics

If you already have a firmware that would work on the beaglebone, you can make something like the SevenSwitch [reprap.org]