Quoteshortyski13Can you, great people of this forum, help me out with specing out the electronic side of the system for a printer I have described for both nema 17 motors and nema 23 motors? This would help me a ton and is much appreciated. Thanks. It depends on how big the Nema23's are, but you can certainly run small Nema23 with a standard Mega/RAMPS setup. I used to run a Rapman like that, thby bobc - General
Quotemaster1900 Is my inference correct? If yes, how can I fix it? Is my board faulty? Not enough information. ENABLE is pulled high by a resistor on RAMPS 1.4, so if you measure the voltage it will be 5V. The Arduino firmware should drive it low to enable the stepper. It's also possible the driver module is faulty, I've had a few bad ones. BTW I assume you mean A4988, A4899 does not exist. Unby bobc - Reprappers
The best advice with this board seems to be : get a refund. Otherwise, nail it to a board, mount it on the wall. Then it will serve as a reminder to buy decent kit that is well supported, instead of whatever is cheapest.by bobc - General
Solar insolation on Mars in a favourable location is about 600W/m2, about half that of Earth. Since payload mass is an issue, solar has better kW/tonne ratio than nuclear. E.g. 120 kWh solar is about a tonne, a 120kWh nuclear is something like 3.5 tonnes. Unfortunately, dust storms can last months, so I would not rely on solar. Any habitat on Mars needs to have good radiation shielding . "The maby bobc - General
Quotedc42 Quotebobc Quoteo_lampe I agree with David, brushes can wear out, but a DC motor is so much easier to control. E. g. the L6234D chip is a 3phase H-bridge, able to control one BLDC motor or three DC motors. It would be a good starting point for a new generation of controllers. That's a triple half bridge, I think for bi-directional control you need a full bridge. There seem to be a lot oby bobc - General
Quoteo_lampe I agree with David, brushes can wear out, but a DC motor is so much easier to control. E. g. the L6234D chip is a 3phase H-bridge, able to control one BLDC motor or three DC motors. It would be a good starting point for a new generation of controllers. That's a triple half bridge, I think for bi-directional control you need a full bridge. There seem to be a lot of driver chips for sby bobc - General
Elon Musk's idea (and also other people) is that we should create a self-sustaining colony on Mars as a "backup" civ for Earth, should an extinction event occur to civilization on Earth (large asteroid or something). (This assumes that only Earth is affected, some events could affect both Earth and Mars). Creating any sort of human habitat on Mars presents severe technical challenges, I am not suby bobc - General
QuoteMechaBits Fix this Planet Yeah, good point, but really it is people, not the planet, that need fixing I'm not sure there is a politically acceptable way to fix people, so engineers are called in to provide the "techno-fix". The iPhone is the opiate of the masses. Might keep us distracted until the Big One hits.by bobc - General
There are a lot of theoretical concerns, I think it would be interesting to review what has been achieved already : I think that is by misan? That demonstration seems to get quite far - it actually prints. I would try to reproduce what he did, but I can't find a source for the motors he used. I think he has an additional Arduino mini driving each axis, so I would try to incorporate that functiby bobc - General
NASA's 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge QuoteNASA's 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge seeks to foster development of new technologies to additively manufacture a habitat using local indigenous materials with, or without, recyclable materials, in space and on Earth. In other words, we want America's best and brightest to help us figure out how to build a house on Mars, using advanced 3D printing technoloby bobc - General
QuoteAleksClark The benefits of closed-loop control should be pretty obvious: cheap DC motors instead of steppers, for a given torque I'm not sure that is obvious, despite people frequently claiming it. The costs of 2d printers are misleading, because the cost is mainly driven by mass production, not just technology. If you are making 100,000 2d printers, it is worth spending $50k to make itby bobc - General
RAMPS strikes again! Amazing we don't have anything better yet.by bobc - General
It's important to realise that GPL and other licenses derive from copyright law. In general, hardware designs are not covered by copyright law. Copyright is designed to protect artistic and creative works, e.g. music, novels, paintings, sculpture. Works described as "utility" items are not copyright, but may possibly be protected by patents. There is a very loose gentlemen's agreement that GPL iby bobc - General
Quotedc42 Quotenophead >Smoothieware, running on a Smoothieboard, saves a lot of time, and to me that's a feature worth paying for. Smoothieboard is an ironic name as it doesn't even do x16 microstepping accurately and has glitches in the the ADC. The last time I paid any attention to the software (which was admittedly a long time ago) it didn't even manage to coordinate the motors to stop atby bobc - General
Jesus, don't you ever get tired of spamming for Duet? Desperate for sales? Whatever the topic, on any web site, you manage to get a plug in for Duet. You're as bad as Arthur Wolf!by bobc - Crowdfunding Projects Announcements
I have signed up for one of these boards, it's quite likely that Marlin will get ported to it!by bobc - Crowdfunding Projects Announcements
3MF is basically an attempt by Microsoft to control the 3D printing market. In typical MS style, they cherry pick ideas from elsewhere, wrap it up in a bloated format they can call their own, and have it supported only by Microsoft OS. It's a great shame they didn't support something open and existing like AMF, help improve it and promote it's adoption.by bobc - Developers
Yeah, just buy a Duet. That's all there is in RepRap. Maybe someone else will come and sell you stuff soon.by bobc - General
Replicape B3 is about 4.2 by 2.7 inch, a little larger than RAMPS 1.4, plus the connectors appear to be right-angle rather than vertical, but they could be replaced. Replicape runs Linux firmware "Redeem", and you would need to pre-order Replicape. I think your easiest route would be to get Smart Ramps and replace the MOSFETS, and maybe fuses while you are about it. Smart Ramps has different Auxby bobc - General
QuoteWurstnase Nice work! Is it possible to extend the MS1-3 with SPI? There are new driver in the market called TMC2130 silent stepstick. You can find the schematics etc. on GitHub. Search there "Watterott" a German open source hardware shop. The driver are similar to TMC2100 but has some great features like coolstep, interpolation to 1/256 u-steps, and up to 1/256 native u-steps. It's an intby bobc - Controllers
QuotePDBeal Quotebobc For anyone interested I have put a preliminary v2.2 on github : Is this for the existing Arduino Due or were you able to confirm this would work with the new Arduino STAR - OTTO? I can't tell yet, Arduino.org haven't published any schematics or other details, I've only got the web pictures to go on.by bobc - Controllers
For anyone interested I have put a preliminary v2.2 on github : Please note : this is not a production release!by bobc - Controllers
Quoteshearder I am looking for mods for the RapMan 3.2 - I know this is RepRap but i am hoping someone can assist. so i am thinking of goinbg to Alu extrusion for the frame and ball screw etc. Any ideas or links? Since the demise of BfB, interest in RapMan seems to have died with it. I have an ongoing project to rebuild my Rapman to replace all the acrylic parts and electronics, but goes slowly.by bobc - General
Quotedc42 IMO, so-called SMART RAMPS is just as dumb as the original. It still has no on-board 5V regulator to power GLCDs without overloading the 5V regulator on the Arduino, and it still has a poorly-chosen bed heater mosfet. What a wasted opportunity. You never tire of knocking other people's work do you? It seems you post just to get another plug in for your products. If you've nothing conby bobc - RAMPS Electronics
I haven't seen a schematic for the Otto, but as far as I can tell it follows the Due pin functions quite well. The same can not be said for another STM32 board , they have screwed up the pinout by replacing signal pins with power pins, really dumb. Otherwise the board is quite cheap, and I think the 3 pins affected aren't too important for RAMPS-FD.by bobc - Controllers
Yes, I was just doing some work recently, I think I am nearly ready to get some boards made. Regarding github, all my projects are in KiCad. Arduino fans may have noticed the Star Otto, recently announced by the "other" Arduino. There are some question marks about it, and price unknown, but it has a nippy Cortex M4 processor and wifi using ESP8266, which has piqued my interest.by bobc - Controllers
LoL, I was only trolling. I was just wondering how it would sound if I reversed the insults. "Engineers are all nerds with poor social skills, who live with their parents and sit in their bedrooms typing angry messages at the internet" Anyone like to guess what my point is? Clue: stereotypes are bullshit, fodder for lazy minds. I am a moron. You are a moron. We are all morons. So how about weby bobc - Controllers
I've had batches of stepper drivers that just plain don't work. After replacing with different, slightly less cheap steppers, everything sprang into life and worked as I expected.by bobc - Reprappers
The thing is, even if the device is 99% efficient, that leaves 3W or so to dissipate in the device. The IRLB8743 has junction-to-ambient of 62 deg/W, so that would be a temperature rise of 186 deg (package in free air), clearly not feasible. Generally, the thermal performance of these packages on their own is pretty terrible, and they are designed to be used with an external cooling solution, heby bobc - Controllers