TB65650 + Arduino Leonardo

Hi everybody, this is my first post here, nice to join this community.

I have 1 Arduino Leonardo, and this board:

[reprap.org]

I am thinking about rep-rapping my way into the 3d printing world, but i need to know some things:

1- Can i use my Leonardo and that board together? I mean, can i use leonardo as a GCode interpreter?
2- If not, can i use that board alone to control a printer with a parallel port? It has 4 axis stepper control (3 axis + extruder) and one relay for the extruder.

If more electronic boards are needed, for temperature control, heating bed and so on, i can provide those. I only need to know where to find a firmware for the Leonardo (Atmega32u4).

thanks for your time.

Should be possible. There are three choices as I see it. You could try to get a reprap firmware up on the Leonardo, you could get a different arduino, or you could skip the reprap firmware and run the stepper board directly from the parallel port. For the first two choices you would have the benefit of reprap software, firmware and support from a large group of reprapers that know said software and firmware. if you can get the Otherwise you would be tossing the Leonardo and running directly off the computer using Mach3 or some other CNC software. There aren't so many doing that so you'd likely have less support around here, though there are some groups doing similar things.

Thank you for your answer.
I think the first choice is impossible for me, because Leonardo runs on a different line of controllers than the Uno/Mega do. So i strongly doubt it would be as easy as simply changing some pin numbers. I think adding support for Leonardo would be very easy for someone else and very useful for all of us, but i'm not familiar enough to the 32U4 and low level programming to attempt such a task.

Anyway, is the temperature feedback from the extruder and the heated bed vital?
Is it just a matter of maintaining the temperature as constant as possible, or to control the temperature dynamically from the computer during the printing process?

Because in the first case i can simply control extruder and bed by separate circuits, and save some pins on the Arduino (or the parallel port).

Thanks again

Some people rely on dynamically controlling the temperature, while some don't bother.

eg: Printing the first layer of a printer at a slightly hotter temperature to ensure it sticks to the bed is common.

There is now a wood filament out there and the colour of the resulting wood (from light to dark brown) is controlled by the temp it's printed at, so I'm sure we may see temp-changes included mid-print soon.

Note: One issue with those TB6560 boards is that they tend to need longer step/direction pulses compared to other setups like the Pololu's on RAMPS (varies from board to board, and also depends on if you leave the optos in place or not). So far, the only firmware I've heard of that has support for driving them is Teacup, which has an option to increase the pulse lengths to reliably trigger the steppers.

> Note: One issue with those TB6560 boards is that
> they tend to need longer step/direction pulses
> compared to other setups like the Pololu's on
> RAMPS (varies from board to board, and also
> depends on if you leave the optos in place or
> not). So far, the only firmware I've heard of that
> has support for driving them is Teacup, which has
> an option to increase the pulse lengths to
> reliably trigger the steppers.

Thank you for this tip, i didn't even know the ON pulse length could be even relevant.

I think i will buy an Arduino Mega and go for Teacup.

the latest version of marlin seems to work with 6560