Hobby electronics and software
Small project for 3D printing and other hobbies
I finally got annoyed enough by the mess of cables and decided to finish an enclosure for the PRNTR board. I finished designing the bottom half.
This is what it looks like in the OnShape assembly:
View from another angle:
Closeup of the final assembly – the outer fan duct:
A look over the whole board:
And finally this is what it looks like, when powered up:
All 3D component designs are available in OhShape here.
After a few unsuccessful attempts, I got Smoothie to move my stepper motors on the PrntrBoard controller.
At first the smoothie had a bug in the SPI dirver and was unable to talk to the TMC2130 chips. Fixed that, then the steppers still would not move.
I can see the drivers were sending current, because my power supply would start the fans up, but zero steps. I spend the day trying to diff the configuration between Marlin and Smoothie, but nothing was wrong. Finally caught a bug in the Stepper timers and lo and behold movement.
I’ll make a video of my Rigidbot running Smoothie on STM32 next week.
Thanks to the huge work by Matt Baker, I now have Smoothieware V1 booting on the Prntrboard. Matt did an excellent job with the initial port of Smoothie to the STM32 series of CPUs. I did some tweaks and added a target for the NUCLEO-64 board I’m using. After a few weeks of work it does boot and I can verify the temperature controller works.
It does not have all features of the original Smoothie board (no SD-card and no Network) but I do have better drivers – TMC2130.
Here is a picture of me testing the hot end heater control:
The heater was set to a “safe” 55 degree Celsius. I would say the PWM control for the heater is much “smoother” on the Smoothieware.
My port of Smoothieware V1 is on github. My working branch is stm32f4. I also have stm32f4-tmc2130 with the TMC patches.
https://github.com/ghent360/Smoothieware-STM32F4
Here is a picture of the heater setup:
