A year ago or so I bought a Rambo version 1.0d from ultimachine.
I had been using the sanguino board for two of the Prusa Mendels that I had built but was tired of the need to replace Pololu's any time I made the mistake of overdriving them or something got jammed or... Any of the many reasons I killed one. While setting up and fine tuning the Prusa I had made many of the errors one makes and for one reason or another fried one or more pololu.
I was intrigued by the concept of a nice clean board that had over current protection built in and controlled digitally. The Rambo is a nice clean board with lots of capability. I've heard many opine that it is better to keep the pololus separate so you can replace them when problems happen so you don't fry the whole controller. I believe the Rambo developer has the right idea. Build the board with the necessary safeties built in to protect the items that could be damaged. So far I've played with the Rambo for a year and never had a failure. In a year of playing with the Sanguino I replaced 11 pololus. Admittedly if it weren't for the learning curve of the newbie, it may only have been 6 that needed replacing, that is still most of the cost of a whole controller.
The Rambo's biggest weakness however seems to be the lack of develloper and hacker chat.
I was wondering if anyone has experience playing with the following enhancements.
. Adding an LCD screen
. Adding an SD reader
. Adding a Z auto sense servo and micro switch
It would be great to see a forum dedicated to this hardy board as well in the electronics stream. Would this be possible?
Thanks for any and all help,
Mike
