Leaf Labs - MAPLE arduino alternative

Leaf Labs produces a board that appears to be an Arduino alternative. To my understanding, it accepts Arduino native code and has pins arranged in a way to be compatible with current Arduino shields as well (Not Mega).

[www.leaflabs.com]

Haven't found anything on the internets about this board and Reprap, so i thought i'd post here and see if there was anyone doing anything with it.

I bought one and hope to create a shield or daughter board for it and maybe just run the Ultimachine RAMPS code on it. (Im new to Arduino) I am assuming that this is possible considering its seamless compatibility.

Please comment! Cheers!

You'd need to redo the actual shield, since the RAMPS shield is built for a mega.

Looking at it, it seems like you may just have enough pins to drive all the circuitry required.

it has an ARM cortex M3 processor, so you'll need to find some firmware for it. I believe casainho is trying to port some firmware to ARM, and there may be other efforts as well.

It's far more capable than the arduino, so once the firmware hurdle is overcome it should make a lovely controller board.

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Wooden Mendel
Teacup Firmware

Greetings all,

I have one of the first-generation leaflabs maple boards. I'm considering getting another (r5) real soon now.
One of the things I like the most about the Maple is that leaflabs tools support both Arduino software (I think they forked the code, and substantially modified it to work with GCC for the Cortex M3 arch.) as well old-school/command line tools.
Note also that the chip they're using has 12-bit A2D converters. (The first-gen Maple had some layout and decoupling issues, so it didn't do justice to the higher-rez A2Ds; I think they've fixed that in r5.

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Larry Pfeffer,

My blog about building repstrap Cerberus:
[repstrap-cerberus.blogspot.com]

Sorry for the late response. Thank you all for the information. I am still looking to getting this moving, atleast for myself. I will definately make an effort to document and share my findings, but i am no expert.

Is anyone interested in getting a circuit drawn up? I would be willing to pay for your board to be made. This should be a shield for "The Maple" board. This board is tiny so i'm sure the end shield design will overhang just a bit, which is ok. The following should be included so we have plenty of room to experiment.

5 Pololu Stepper controller slots
5 Four pin headers for plugging in the steppers
6 Three pin headers for the end stops
3 Two pin headers for Thermistors
1 12V input with appropriate signal smoothing
3 High current FETs for driving your heaters

These is just a wish list. If you have ideas on how to improve or simplify feel free.

Thank you for taking a look. I hope something comes from this.

In case anyone wants something to work off of. Heres a template of the board layout.

Thanks CidVilas,
I have no electronics experience but am looking to buy boards that can handle 6 stepper motors. 4 for the machine and 2 for dual extruder setup.
Is this board able to handle two or three heaters as well ?

At $200 for RAMPS and $150 for Gen 6... there's a lot of room for another solution.

Sacrificing the pins for SD card and maybe even a Key pad, you could easily add 6 steppers (3 pin per Pololu), 4 Thermistor (3 Heads Plus heated bed), 4 Heater MosFets, and some other minimum requirements like endstops and leds.

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I [...] am looking to buy boards that can handle 6 stepper motors.

Adding a few more steppers to Gen7 is almost trivial. Just copy the schematics part of one stepper and find another pair of free I/O pins on the ATmega. Then find some space on the PCB.

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At $200 for RAMPS

Uh. How do you get to $200? That's $50 for the Arduino, $15 for the PCB, 4x$12 for the Pololus and about $10 for the remaining parts. Makes $123 with my maths. The currently cheapest solution is, again, Gen7. It replaces the Arduino with bare chips for about $15 and the PCB with a reprapped one.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Thanks guys,

Ok, so I'm looking to Gen7 now..!
Only because it sounds cheaper and simpler than making my own Maple PCBA. (again, I'm hopeless with electronics)

Marcus, I got the $200 from the ultimachine website, for Ramps fully assembled boards.
Is there anyone offering assembled Gen7 PCBA's?

Marcus, will Gen7 be able to run ReplicatorG as well you think ??

Ok, will go looking on the Gen7 wikis. thanks again.

Maple is a 32-bit processor running at 72Mhz. I wouldnt call it a replacement, but comparing it to the RAMPS setup, it would simply be a matter of availability when it came to price. The benefits of Maple is the huge amount of onboard resources available. You are no longer limited to the 16Mhz with the Arduino family and 72Mhz with Maple. So really comparing the list below, Arduino Mega 2560 provides some advantages in I/O and Flash Memory, but taking into consideration that the device can handle Native USB at the same price if not slightly cheaper, it adds an option. Of course i dont want to say its better, just an alternative. I currently have a Mendel running Arduino Mega 2560 with RAMPS and the machine is operating beautifully. I'd just like to see more advanced chips used in order to introduce additional functionality.
The argument over price should not push people away from experimenting.

Maple Board (http://leaflabs.com/devices/)

• 72Mhz
• 120kb Flash Memory
• 20kb SRAM
• 37 I/O pins
• Native USB
• 15 Pins provide PWM 16-bit resolution

Arduino Mega 2560 (http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardMega2560)

• 16Mhz
• 256kb Flash Memory
• 8kb SRAM
• 54 I/O Pins
• Uses USB to Serial interface
• 14 Pins provide PWM 8-bit resolution

Just another look at a Arduino Mega Clone using the Maple
Maple Native (http://leaflabs.com/devices/)

• 72Mhz
• 512kb Flash Memory
• 64kb SRAM
• I/O pins have not been announced yet, but almost guaranteed to mimic Mega
• Native USB
• PWM at 16-bit resolution

Discussion about RAMPS/Gen7 continued on the Gen7 thread

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

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The benefits of Maple is the huge amount of onboard resources available.

To be honest, the currently used ATmegas don't lack resources in terms of pins or RAM or similar. Firmware still runs on the old ATmega168 successfully and at the same speed as on the ATmega2560. Clock speed isn't interesting either, but integer math speed is. So, if you compare MHz, you also have to compare how many cycles an addition, multiplication or division needs.

The current advantage of the Maple I can see is the 32 bit width, at the cost of rewriting the whole firmware. This would allow to go beyond 1/16 microstepping, or adding something like a serious display or an ethernet host.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Technically, the firmware wouldn't have to be rewritten. According to the documentation on Leaf Labs website, these boards in combination with their IDE can be programed with the same code just modifying pin assignments maybe. Slight mods may need to be made to Types and timing delays.
Guessing as I haven't dug into the code yet.

I surely disagree with some of the claims that Arduino performance compares to the Maple Leaf. The Maple is not much better only because of the Clock, the DMA can make a huge difference to IO like SD cards, the 32 bits can make float point instructions much faster than in a 8bit FPU.

If the Maple don't heve enough flash/SDRAM memory for you, thay will launch a Maple Native some time soon. 512KB fo flash and 64KB of SRAM and 1MB of RAM(?).

Ask casinho about the performance of the processor he is using in his All-in-One 100MHz ARM board:
[forums.reprap.org] / [www.3dprinting-r2c2.com]
He was able to get 200mm/s with it...

I think the community should already have done a RAMPS for Leaf Maple. It could me Called ReMPS (RepRap Maple Pololu Shield), hehehe.

I sugest we(more you then me, I dont know jack about PCB project, I am a computer Science Student) start a ReMPS TaskForce.

LeafLabs released Maple RET6 that comes with a STM32F103RET6.

"The RET6 has over 3 times the RAM (64K, 4 times the Flash memory (512K, and many additional peripherals (like DACs!) not present on the RBT6. "

And it is only U$10 more expensive

The Maple uses the standard Arduino layout, RAMPS uses the Mega layout and so are not directly compatible.

Its not compatible, thats why i suggested the TaskForce. The Maple layout is compatible with arduino UNO, but it has some additional headers that complete 39 IO pins, thats why it can be done with the Maple layout.

If LeafLabs cooperate with us, MAPLEs next big brother, (MAPLE RET6) that carries the 512MB Flash, will also be compatible in the future...