32 Bit; Am I missing the point

With the obvious processing power of 32 Bit boards such as smoothie, duet or even Beaglebone Black and Replicape over 8 Bit Arduino based boards such as RAMPS 1.4 (necessary or not) a lot of discussion has been generated over which is best.

Is it not possible to use RAMPS or other style Arduino Steeper Controller Boards with the new Arduino Zero or indeed Due (which I believe Smoothieboard is based on) Or am I missing something?

There are some RAMPS-style add-on boards for the Arduino Due, such as RAMPS-FD (which had some design issues) and RADDS. There is a thread in this forum on using an ordinary RAMPS board with Arduino Due, but doing so runs the mosfets out of specification, so I advise against it unless you know what you are doing and take measurements. None of these solutions provides software control of the stepper motor currents, ease of configuration, or an Ethernet port - which Duet and Smoothie do.

The Arduino Zero has rather fewer pins that the Due or Mega, but still enough to use as the basis of a 3D printer controller. Like the Due it's a 3.3V board, so the same considerations about interfacing to the heater mosfets applies.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/03/2015 06:13AM by dc42.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

You are missing the part that most of the 32-bit boards are 3.3V, whereas the 8-bit boards are 5V. It is cheaper/cleaner to design a new board than adapt the old one.

Smoothieboard is not based on the DUE. That's the DUET board.

When you get done with your DUE-based controller, you will still be stuck with 32-bit ports of the usual 8-bit firmware and their nested #ifdef spaghetti. No, thank you.....

Quote
Dave_robinson_022
With the obvious processing power of 32 Bit boards such as smoothie, duet or even Beaglebone Black and Replicape over 8 Bit Arduino based boards such as RAMPS 1.4 (necessary or not) a lot of discussion has been generated over which is best.

Is it not possible to use RAMPS or other style Arduino Steeper Controller Boards with the new Arduino Zero or indeed Due (which I believe Smoothieboard is based on) Or am I missing something?

If you have some basic soldering skills you can easily modify a $7 RAMPS 1.4 clone to work with a $15 Arduino Due clone:

[forums.reprap.org]

But honestly, you are wasting your time worrying about such things at this point.

The something you are missing is essentially the experience of building your own RepRap 3D printer. All these questions are really irrelevant until you have built your first 3D printer and very probably it will use an 8-bit controller board with either Marlin or Repetier firmware, both of which have been working fine for the last few years with an inexpensive 8-bit Arduino and RAMPS, and will continue to work fine for the foreseeable future, despite all the naysayers.

BTW there is a New Zealand Users Group forum here, check it out. Also, whenever you feel like getting started on building your own RepRap 3D printer, I suggest you contact Mike Paauwe, the designer of the Delta-Pi, [www.makershop.co.nz]