Extension Board?

[akurz42]

Hey,

Just a question, not a problem: will there be a way to extend the number of steppers? Reason is that 5 drivers just don't cut it for me as I have a Triple-Extruder/Single-Nozzle setup for multi-material printing, so for me it's a minimum of 6 steppers (better 7 for separate Z-Steppers).

Cheers,
Alex

[hasenbanck]

You could use the 40 pin header to connect such a board. You have access to 4 hardware PWM signals, some digital pins and the SPI bus. So you could create an extension board with aditional 4 drivers.

Please be aware that the project is currently on hiatus, since there is no real interrest by other developers for this board and I don't have the funds right now to produce development boards (It's entirely a private project).

[akurz42]

Ah what a pity. A proper 32bit printer board is direly needed. The only acceptable "open" board is the RADDS, which I'm using right now. Becomes an ugly spaghetti monster when using a non-RADDS display and pulling out SPI wires to control TMCs. The Duet family is quite nice, but too restrictive for my taste.

Seems like we have to wait some more until vendors figure out that 8bit is a dead end.

Cheers,
Alex

[hasenbanck]

You can't create "one fits all needs" board, so you have to pick your poison. My board RemRam is finished and commercialy available (some german shop does produce them), but has different design parameters.

There is also "ARMED", some chinese 32bit boards with Marlin support and of course Duet.

[akurz42]

RemRam I know. 4x 2130 and 5V fans. 4 steppers is even further from my specs and there's no way back to 2130 after having used 5160s. Armed I don't know - that's not Re-Arm, is it?

Anyways, like you say there's no perfect solution for everyone and I realize the I'm a bit off mainstream with my requirements. Would have been nice to see another alternative in the market to set some counterweight to the Duets.

Cheers,
Alex

[hansd56]

How much would it cost to get some prototype boards manufactured?

[hasenbanck]

We once did a quote at a chinese board produceer. I think the price was around 250€ per unit when you let them produce 10 boards.

If you just want to build one board and buy the PCB and parts yourself, then you need to invest around 300€ and need to build it yourself.