Hey all,
Thought i would show off a little project i have been working on. A maple mini powered 3d printer board.
The firmware is still in the works but hey, i got it playing the imperial march! progress.
3d Printer Board
(6 posts) (2 voices)-
Ok a bit more detail,
So this board is my second attempt at a semi complex project.
You can find its repository hereAn image of the board is here and the crude schematic is here
Its supports 4 axis (x,y,z,e) using the A4988 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier (or step stick or similar)
I'm a fan of things being as modular as possible, so these sit on headers just like the maple mini.There is also 4 end stop headers (x,y,z,emergency) which should be tied to external interrupts. and 3 thermistor sensor headers.
I've gone for a more robust method of wiring steppers and other power hungry peripherals (heated bed and hot end) using screw blocks. (makes life so much nicer than crappy molex connectors)
The board itself is roughly 100mm x 100mm but could very easily be shrunk, (I got seeed to manufacture it so its cheap as chips at that size as well)
The heated bed has its on separate power rails, (probably didn't need these and i am just using a bridge to drive this off of my 12v in)
The heated bed and hotend are driven by a IRLB8721PBF-ND which should be a logic level mosfet capable of easily switching the high amp loads. (it was a suggested replacement for the now retired mosfets on the RFP30N06LE)
There is also two more slots for Fans or another hot end heater, and an SD card socket (which i'm having some issues getting to work)
I think the power of the maple mini will be a great benefit to 3d printing. The atmega chips just don't have enough room or speed for me to be totally content using them.
Posted 2 years ago # -
What problems are you having with the SD Card? I'm part of the support team for mapleSDFat if you're using that.
I'm very interested in your board, although there is a couple of things where I feel things could be improved to allow additional add-ons such as a LCD character display or a TFT screen (one of my recent projects is having a 3.2" TFT screen connected to the Libmaple using only 9 pins (4 of those pins are for SPI) plus another 3 pins for the touch screen (again reusing pins for SPI)). A few of the signals are possibly not toggled as often so could be driven using a 74HC164 for example to drive the A4988 stepper drive enable and direction signals. There are other options as well, but it's something to think about. I've actually thought about making a 3D printer board set up around the STM32 (possibly the STM32F3s).
I'm guessing you have a few PCBs left over from your seeedstudio order, would you be looking at selling them later? Certainly feel free to keep us up to date with your progress!
Posted 2 years ago # -
I've not used an SD card before in any of my projects, so its probably an issue on the coding end (i hope) I will have to give mapleSDFat a spin.
I agree your improvements would improve the board significantly. I believe i will have to do another revision to incorporate them (luckily everything is nice and broken out to start with so hacking an lcd to the board shouldn't be an issue).
an on board microprocessor would probably be a bit beyond my skills at the moment, but would be pretty neat.
Plenty of pcbs left over, if all works according to plan, i will probably see if anyone wants to try out a board, (and potentially put a kit together or something)
Posted 2 years ago #
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