Wilson II upgrade to Smoothiewear
Posted by Fobose
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Re: Wilson II upgrade to Smoothiewear January 11, 2016 03:57PM |
I went from Arduino Mega/RAMPS to Smoothieboard in my printer. It was a relatively easy conversion especially since the connections for motors, etc. are brought to the edges of the board.
The motor drivers are MUCH better than the little Pololu things on the RAMPS board because the chips on the smoothieboard are properly heatsinked to the ground plane of the board. You may have had problems with the RAMPS motor driver modules, but you aren't likely to have the same problems with the smoothieboard. There are three things that kill the motor drivers- disconnecting the motor (or a failed cable that does that) while it is powered up, and overheating the driver because you have the current set too high, or breaking the pot. On the smoothieboard, motor current is programmed in the config file, and there's no pot to break. If a motor driver somehow gets killed, you can use any unused drivers on the board with a simple config change. If there are no spares on the board, you can use an external driver by easily connecting to the step/direction/enable signal pins on the smoothieboard.
The idea that using easily replaceable modules is better is a fallacy. The drivers get killed easily because they are on those little, modular, easily replaceable boards.
It's good that they are easily replaceable because you will need to do that a lot. Easy replacement is good, having to do it isn't.
Another thing you'll love about the smoothieboard is no more screwing around hunting for the right config file in Marlin, and no messing with the flaky Arduino IDE to recompile the firmware every time you want to make a change. All config variables are stored in a single text file on a uSD card. The card is read each time the board boots up, so if you want to make a change, just edit the one text file (no searching through 6 different files looking for the variable) and reboot the board. No recompile necessary! Firmware updates are done the same way- store the new firmware file on the uSD card and reboot. Smoothieware's boot loader will find it and update the firmware without any screwing around.
You can also print gcode files stored on the uSD card, or add an LCD display/encoder board for reliable, stand-alone operation. There are a bunch of other features, such as networking and a built in web server to control the printer, but I don't use that stuff so I can't tell you much about it.
You can see how I wired my smoothieboard by following the link in my sig, below. I use external DSP drivers on the X and Y axis NEMA-23 motors and the smoothieboard's drivers for the Z axis NEMA-23 motor and extruder.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/12/2016 07:39AM by the_digital_dentist.
Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]
The motor drivers are MUCH better than the little Pololu things on the RAMPS board because the chips on the smoothieboard are properly heatsinked to the ground plane of the board. You may have had problems with the RAMPS motor driver modules, but you aren't likely to have the same problems with the smoothieboard. There are three things that kill the motor drivers- disconnecting the motor (or a failed cable that does that) while it is powered up, and overheating the driver because you have the current set too high, or breaking the pot. On the smoothieboard, motor current is programmed in the config file, and there's no pot to break. If a motor driver somehow gets killed, you can use any unused drivers on the board with a simple config change. If there are no spares on the board, you can use an external driver by easily connecting to the step/direction/enable signal pins on the smoothieboard.
The idea that using easily replaceable modules is better is a fallacy. The drivers get killed easily because they are on those little, modular, easily replaceable boards.
It's good that they are easily replaceable because you will need to do that a lot. Easy replacement is good, having to do it isn't.
Another thing you'll love about the smoothieboard is no more screwing around hunting for the right config file in Marlin, and no messing with the flaky Arduino IDE to recompile the firmware every time you want to make a change. All config variables are stored in a single text file on a uSD card. The card is read each time the board boots up, so if you want to make a change, just edit the one text file (no searching through 6 different files looking for the variable) and reboot the board. No recompile necessary! Firmware updates are done the same way- store the new firmware file on the uSD card and reboot. Smoothieware's boot loader will find it and update the firmware without any screwing around.
You can also print gcode files stored on the uSD card, or add an LCD display/encoder board for reliable, stand-alone operation. There are a bunch of other features, such as networking and a built in web server to control the printer, but I don't use that stuff so I can't tell you much about it.
You can see how I wired my smoothieboard by following the link in my sig, below. I use external DSP drivers on the X and Y axis NEMA-23 motors and the smoothieboard's drivers for the Z axis NEMA-23 motor and extruder.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/12/2016 07:39AM by the_digital_dentist.
Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]
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