Driving two extruders

Dear Reprappers,

I am looking into how to separately control the stepper motors of two extruders.

I am using two extruder controllers and I have hooked up one stepper motor to each of them.

The following code is supposed to only turn 'extruder 0' stepper motor on. However, when I executed the code using Host Software, both motors, instead of one, turned.

"
T0;
G1 F2000.0;
G1 E200.0;
"

I wonder how could I only turn one of them?

Many thanks!
Bing

Hi Bing,
Sounds like you need to change the configuration.h in one of your extruders firmware.

#define MY_NAME '1'

Once you do figure it out, please tack up some notes on the wiki at "Multiple Extruders" or "Multiple Toolheads" using the Example Page.
[objects.reprap.org]

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

Hi Johnny,

Thanks for your reply! We did change the MY_NAME of one extruder to '1'. And in fact, we are able to drive two fans separately. However, the two stepper motors always move simultaneously.


Bing



johnnyr Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi Bing,
> Sounds like you need to change the configuration.h
> in one of your extruders firmware.
>
> #define MY_NAME '1'

I see. I am assuming that you are using the reprap motherboard, if not the rest of this post is irrelevant.

Looking at pins.h I don't see the step and dir pins for the second extruder under the #elif MOTHERBOARD == 2 section.

They show in the direct drive motherboard section, but there doesn't appear to be enough pins with the rs485 stuff. I am guessing you may be able to borrow a couple max endstop pins.

I do not know about the fact that they are called EXTRUDER_0_MOTOR_DIR_PIN and EXTRUDER_1_MOTOR_DIR_PIN in the direct drive section of pins.h and E_STEP_PIN in the motherboard section. It appears that maybe if MOTHERBOARD == 2 then there is no support for dual extruders. If that is the case hopefully somebody with a better understanding will help. Either way I think I will benefit from looking into this issue with you as I find it and your spoolhead project quite interesting.