Cables available somewhere? Pin layout?

Hi @staff,
I was wondering if I want to tinker myself with Snapmaker 2, say, devolp my own toolhead, are the cables, the plugs or anything needed to connect to the controller available anywhere, be it through Snapmaker or some other dealer? Also, is the pin layout (which signal/voltage goes to what pin) available somewhere? is it correct that you use STM MCUs in the modules? So that if I want to later build upon some of your firmwares I best use such controllers myself?
Thanks for any insights! I have no specific plans yet, but sooner or later I certainly will :slight_smile:
Kind regards
Hauke

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I was going to ask about that, extensibility of the system done by the community, not only Snapmaker. Snapmaker should provide the necessary documentation the community to develop their own modules.
@staff Where can we find this documentation?

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I am also interested in pinouts…I am building my own enclosure and would like to add some of the features - interlocks/lighting…etc.

Dave

@Edwin Apparently, people at @staff are too busy…

I know the Pin outs on the heat bed are simple…two pins (with the larger wires) are for the heater module the other two are the temp sensor…haha, but I bet everyone could figure that one out.

I’ve got a spare module with stepper and controller, could take some pics of the wiring, maybe give you an idea. I’d be safe to assume that two wires are your supply voltage wires, two will be your CAN bus connection, can’t remember how many wires offhand are in the stepper motor control cabling. From the kickstarter ad I thought they said everything was CAN bus on these units, so technically thats all the wiring you’d need, supply voltage and signal wires…problem is getting the CAN bus technical information so it’ll communicate with the controller properly.

On the extruder module I believe the CANbus is only used for filament switch and fans and it also has step, dir and en pins for the stepper driver in the module. The linear module use CANbus for the limit switch only and also have step, dir and en pins for the stepper driver.

interesting, so they aren’t fully CAN bus, just certain things, that should make it easier to design expansion stuff

Hi @Hauke,

I can give you some extra information:

  • The main MCU is the GigaDevice GD32F305VGT6 - GD32 ARM Cortex-M4 Microcontroller, a very powerful one but definitely not common ( you already can see also the HAL GD32F1 in the Snapmaker Marlin Code shared, which seems to be based in the STM32F1 but not 100% the same )
  • Regarding the connector, the pin-out is as follows:
        _____________/=====\_____________
       /     24V    DIR    CAN_L    NC   \
       \  EN   STEP   CAN_H   GND        /
        ---------------------------------

so the steppers have kind of direct control, the rest need a small microcontroller for the rest of the functions and managing the messaging on the CAN bus. The MCUs used in the modules still did not get that information.

Definitely, unless the CAN protocol is explained, would be difficult to do anything with it. Should be feasible find it out analyzing the source code already given as it seems that is just using the Marlin implementation, but that will take more time, at least to myself ( maybe others that know better Marlin can figure it out quickly )

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Hi @Franky,

thanks for this information! I think that’s really helpful to have the stepper control directly available, makes the development of a rather simple toolhead like a syringe for paste extrusion relatively easy.