Cannibalizing RAMPS for use with different stepper drivers

Hello,

A team at school and myself are building a 3d printer for a competition. I've built and used RAMPS myself at home, and figured we could use the same in our case, except that we plan on using higher power steppers for a bigger/potentially faster machine (NEMA 23s in 14-20kg-cm range). Therefore I'm thinking of duplicating the heater and thermistor circuits and simply passing the step signals from the arduino to discrete driver boards with higher current ratings than the A4983s. I have a very rough depiction below, and just wanted to confirm with someone knowledgeable that the thermistor and extruder heater circuits are correctly copied from the RAMPS schematic (http://reprap.org/mediawiki/images/3/3f/Arduinomegapololushieldschematic.png). I am a bit confused about the connector notation on that, and I don't have much electronics experience, so I wasn't quite sure how it specifies those components to be connected.



Any feedback would be appreciated. I plan on putting all the discrete components on some simple breadboards. The only other thing I might be concerned about is whether the extruder heater draws an amount of current that will require me to get a rated breadboard/wires. Again, thanks for your time.

P.S. Unfortunately it looks like the forum system truncates the image instead of scrolling it. You can of course right-click and save it or open it in another tab.

I've just done similar to what you're talking about but used the RAMPS board as it has the outputs / inputs for heaters and limit switches etc.

I'm building an aluminium framed machine using Nema 23 3A steppers which obviously wouldn't work with the standard Pololu stepper drivers. I've only just tested it tonight and so far it seems to be working fine. I used an Audrino Mega 1280 board with Ramps 1.4 ontop of it and have taken the STEP and DIR signals from each axis to an external stepper driver. I'm using Gecko G251 drives.

It seems to be working fine, I've run the RAMPS 1.4 test code on it for about 2 hours and nothing seems to be getting too hot or failing

[reprap.org]

Theres pictures here..

[rappronz.blogspot.com]




Cheers,

Nigel.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2012 04:04AM by Nigel_NZ.

Nice I really like the wire control job, looks a lot better than mine. Just to be sure, are my thermistor and heater circuits correct?

Hello,

I am having problem connecting external stepper driver (Leadshine - 880A) with RAMPS 1.4..
Please provide the detail info about how to connect stepper driver with RAMPS 1.4 and if possible provide the sketch or circuit diagram..

Thanks

simply connect step, dir and grnd

i'm using m542 with ramps and it works great