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Project:Cupcake-o-Matic: Difference between revisions
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→Updating the Electronics
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One problem is that the Motherboard could only support 3 stepper motors however most 3D printers started to use a fourth stepper motor to drive the extruder. This led to some interesting hacks to add another stepper control channel to the Motherboard, the most popular of these was the [http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11837 3G 5D Shield]. It took one of the end stops from each Stepper Motor Driver and used them to generate the Enable, Step and Direction signals for a fourth Stepper Motor Driver. I did in fact make the required modifications to my Motherboard, see [http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:25852 here], but I never did get round to using it as I decided that I wanted to step away from having so many separate boards mounted on my Cupcakes chassis. | One problem is that the Motherboard could only support 3 stepper motors however most 3D printers started to use a fourth stepper motor to drive the extruder. This led to some interesting hacks to add another stepper control channel to the Motherboard, the most popular of these was the [http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11837 3G 5D Shield]. It took one of the end stops from each Stepper Motor Driver and used them to generate the Enable, Step and Direction signals for a fourth Stepper Motor Driver. I did in fact make the required modifications to my Motherboard, see [http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:25852 here], but I never did get round to using it as I decided that I wanted to step away from having so many separate boards mounted on my Cupcakes chassis. | ||
Whilst looking at alternatives for the electronics I came across the [http://reprap.org/wiki/Sanguinololu Sanguinololu] controller board. Checking on eBay had | Whilst looking at alternatives for the electronics I came across the [http://reprap.org/wiki/Sanguinololu Sanguinololu] controller board. Checking on eBay had a Sanguinololu v1.2+ listed, complete, for £89.00 + P&P. I decided that it would be better to just buy these electronics which would allow me to simply drop in Sprinter, Marlin or something more esoteric without having to modify everything so that it would work with a RepRap Motherboard. I simply have to edit the configuration files to match my Cupcake. Of course it is not as simple as plug and play, the new firmwares allow for things like acceleration and software based end stops so will require some tweaking. Nor do many of the connectors match, the stepper motors had 0.156" pitch connector but needed 0.1" connectors, it also meant that I could not use a PC PSU for power anymore. I will talk more about getting rid of the PC power supply in the following section. | ||
===Adding a Cantilever Z Axis=== | ===Adding a Cantilever Z Axis=== | ||
