Reprap Electronics overview

Can you Kiwis help an Old man Emu?

I've got a desktop CNC machine and I was considering fitting an extruder head to it so I could play with reprapping.

I have three steppers which are run off a single board. I am using MACH3 CAM software to read the G-Code and activiate the steppers.

What I'd like to see is an overview of how the electronics of reprap work. Going backwards, I understand that the stepper motors are controlled from the motherboard. The extruder has its own controller board. Where does it get its commands from?

What is the motherboard doing?

The software I use can control the steppers, and is able to generate a signal to control up the extruder motor.

Also, if the role of teh stepper in the extruder head is to feed the plastic into teh heater unit, why does it have to be a stepper motor?

Thanks for your help

Old Man Emu

I use Gen6 electronics from Mendel parts and the extruder is run off the same board as everything else. Electronics is not my thing but I do know it is an Arduino board and I use Skeinforge 41 to create Gcodes for it and Repsnapper on Windows to talk to it

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Experimenting in 3D in New Zealand

when your building something the computer is sending G-code to the controller, working with a 3D printer there are some different codes which control the extruder. to make your CNC rig work with an extruder you will need to find out if you could make your controller read the extrusion G-code and control the actual extruder(stepper motor, heating coil and thermistor). otherwise there may be some way you could re-route the extrusion G code to a different COM port and have a dedicated extruder controller. easiest way of doing that would probably be to find some way of sending the G code to two different com ports at the same time, and build some kind of simplified RAMPS with an arduino, but only with the required bits to control the extruder