| Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff |
| Largest Milled PCB yet? |
| << < (7/8) > >> |
| Kilrah:
--- Quote from: janoc on January 07, 2019, 10:48:23 am ---The "Home" version of Windows 10 doesn't even have this option (nor does it have group policy editor) --- End quote --- You can do it via registry edits (or there are tricks to enable the group policy editor). Clumsy yes, but possible. |
| janoc:
--- Quote from: beanflying on January 06, 2019, 10:49:14 pm ---We have been seeing the first 32 Bit boards getting around more and more over the last year or so, using 8 bit as some sort of a argument or point is what exactly? 8 bit apart from the bottom end of the market will be gone fairly soon IMO. --- End quote --- Well, you were talking about RAMPS. RAMPs is pretty much equivalent with 8bit AVRs, the original RAMPS was a shield for Arduino. That evolved over time into integrated all-in-one boards but the architecture remained pretty much the same. --- Quote from: beanflying on January 06, 2019, 10:49:14 pm ---Marlin is a fairly well developed and constantly evolving standalone interface to a CNC machine in the majority of cases it is 3D printers. There is no reason I can think of it couldn't be forked for example to a non ramps cnc router board in particular if done from scratch. --- End quote --- Marlin itself is not much of an issue, I believe there are some forks/variants for STM32 chips and others. It is more the RAMPs/driver part of the equation which sucks if you try to reuse a common 3D printer board with a CNC machine. --- Quote from: beanflying on January 06, 2019, 10:49:14 pm ---At the Hobby end sizes (lets just pick 3020 and smaller) what is needed is a some modification toward a 3D printer standalone solution. Local Data storage, G Code interpretation, Interface for jogging, setup etc. You are making an assumption that the CNC board would use bottom end Chinese step stick drivers like the 5+ year old RAMPS boards to do this would be a really poor choice given what hardware is already in use and available now. --- End quote --- Again, it was you talking about RAMPS and those are almost all designed around this. If you didn't mean that, then sorry but I don't read minds yet. BTW, "Stepstick" is not Chinese, that's Pololu 's invention - a small DIP carrier board with an Allegro A4988 stepper driver (or similar - e.g. the Trinamic ones are popular) that gets inserted into female headers on the main board. When talking about "Stepstick" it is more about this form factor than anything else today. The idea behind this was to make the drivers easy to replace because the early designs they were failing regularly due to various overloading and short circuits on poorly built RepRaps (where this design comes from - RAMPS stands for "RepRap Arduino Mega Pololu Shield") And even if the board doesn't use these "plug-in" driver boards, they often use the same stepper driver chips directly on the PCB. Either way they would be very underpowered/lacking cooling for a CNC machine. OTOH, if you want to upgrade a router such as 3020, it shouldn't be too hard to interface a board running Marlin with the original electronics if it is serviceable (some are reasonably built but there are also some very poor ones around). It would need only a custom cable, removing the stepper drivers from the Marlin board (if it has any) and maybe some minor code modifications - the control interface for the "Stepstick" style stepper drivers is very similar (if not identical) to what these cheap routers use (a direction signal and a pulse for each step). That would be, IMO, better than trying to rip the old electronics out and trying to use a 3D printer board there instead. |
| Kilrah:
--- Quote from: janoc on January 07, 2019, 11:11:02 am ---OTOH, if you want to upgrade a router such as 3020, it shouldn't be too hard to interface a board running Marlin with the original electronics if it is serviceable (some are reasonably built but there are also some very poor ones around). It would need only a custom cable, removing the stepper drivers from the Marlin board (if it has any) and maybe some minor code modifications - the control interface for the "Stepstick" style stepper drivers is very similar (if not identical) to what these cheap routers use (a direction signal and a pulse for each step). That would be, IMO, better than trying to rip the old electronics out and trying to use a 3D printer board there instead. --- End quote --- Indeed. But while Marlin could totally serve as "g-code execution machine" on a router, for most uses you need manual controls a lot and that's all missing in it. There is a whole bunch of dev work to do to integrate jogging, offsets etc as well as everything you need a router's panel for into the UI... |
| janoc:
--- Quote from: Kilrah on January 07, 2019, 01:07:09 pm ---Indeed. But while Marlin could totally serve as "g-code execution machine" on a router, for most uses you need manual controls a lot and that's all missing in it. There is a whole bunch of dev work to do to integrate jogging, offsets etc as well as everything you need a router's panel for into the UI... --- End quote --- That's true. I believe Marlin has some support for basic LCD/encoder based UI but that's good only for homing the machine and launching the job, not much else. I don't think it even supports stuff like work/tool offsets at all - there is nothing like it on 3D printers (there is no "work" or tool offset to speak of, you only carefully calibrate the Z axis offset and level the bed), so it would surprise me if it did. Also Marlin's G-code is a variant that is tailored for 3D printers, so it has 3D printing specific features but will likely miss features needed for a milling machine. GRBL is better option for a CNC mill in this regard: https://github.com/grbl/grbl It still doesn't have UI but at least it supports the necessary settings and the UI can be added. |
| Kilrah:
Marlin actually has quite a few things not related to 3D printers... it handles a spindle with adjustable speed, direction etc, laser heads,... so it could actually already include most of what's needed on the G-code side. I've gone through it relatively quickly a few months ago when I bought a cheap laser head, and successfully reconfigured and recompiled my printer's Marlin to use it, was basically not much more than uncommenting a few #defines to enable the features and find/map a suitable spare pin. Yeah there's a "move axis" feature in the UI but it's extremely clumsy, even for a 3D printer it's a pain, thankfully you rarely need it. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |