Diamond Hotend

Hi,
I have the Geeetech i3b pro and a little while ago I upgraded the board to the MKS Base v1.5, things are working well.

I am now trying to upgrade to the Diamond Hotend. I have the Diamond and motors. Designed/printed a part to hold the hotend.

Problem:
1. MKS base supports 2 extruders and I have the 2nd Z-Axis motor connected to the 2nd Extruder, so I have no extra motor drivers.
2. The expansion headers are being used by the display board.

I have the original board from the i3b (believe it is Sanguinololu). has anyone created firmware to bridge 2 boards using the spi interface to make 1 board a slave just to receive motor control commands?

or do I need to buy another controller like the Geeetech ramps board that supports 3 extruders?

thanks

The display connector doesn't use all pins on the 5x2 pin header. You could try to find out, which are unused and reroute them to an external stepper driver.
Then flash newest Marlin firmware with your modified pins.h.
But you are probably better off with a Mega/Ramps combo or a Rumba board which has 6 driver ports onboard and works with 24V too.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/11/2017 02:31AM by o_lampe.

I have been looking at the Megatronics v3.0 on ebay. Supports 3 extruders, x, y, z1, z2, 2 fans.

I was just hoping to use the stuff that I have. Still would be cool if you could daisy chain boards in a master/slave config to utilize existing equipment.

As the reprap is a community driven diy type project, people are looking to add more extruders and other things to their systems.
New controller boards aren't going to come out with the new features until someone comes up with a new feature

Think I came up with a solution. I can buy a new controller or a CNC Shield.

What I think I am going to do is wire the spare digital connections from the MKS to the expansion header on the sanguinololu. Write some software for the sanguinololu to pass the signals to the motors.
I have 6 spare Digital and 2 spare Analog connections. I believe that I can use the Analog connections as a Digital output allowing me to control 4 extra motors.

There is no need to pass thru the signal with a second controller ( will only add latency ). A CNC shield wired to the MKS expansion port will do.