Ive parked my snapmaker for quite a while due mainly to a number of issues with the firmware. e.g. bed levelling, nozzle temp discrepancies etc.
I have many other printers I’ve converted all to running duet Wifi boards and am seriously tempted to do this now. ID bypass all the circuitry in the stepper motors and just drive directly from the Duet… allready tested it a year a so ago for a laugh and it was super quiet due to the Duet silent stepper drivers. Id also be able to use BLtouch and configure everything to avoid these silly issues with the firmware.
But I would for a while until figured out lose the laser and CNC functions… What do people think should i do it? Would anyone be interested
I was thinking about this the other day actually. I’d ditch CAN entirely and run control wires like every other machine to control the head functions. Rip the microcontrollers out of the heads.
That is the other class of alternatives. It does have the same consequence for the original question: it’s inadequate just to swap out to a Duet without other hardware modifications.
Yeah id bypass all the CAN bus stuff for the print head (and all the steppers etc for XYZ) not a major issue doing that. Its more the time it would take to figure out how to drive the laser module and CNC head from the duet that Im sure is doable but might need more current draw for the CNC than duet does natively etc.
Alternatively could anyone build the firmware for me with temparature table corrected or better still enable parameters to be altered for the thermistor rather than what seems to be a hardcoded look up table
Yeah if that’s really the crux of your problem why you’re considering these other options yeah I could probably do that in about 5 minutes. Replacing the controller’s definitely the nuclear option if that’s all the issue is.
The nozzle temperature control is done in the tool head firmware so that would be the one that gets edited. PM me we can work on this later today, I’m mostly spending my day designing project boxes in SolidWorks.
Awesome, will try to its bearing in mind time difference as you in the US yes. REally appreciate it as i just dont have the time to learn how to build firmware get Visual Studio installed etc.
Where did bed leveling get to in the end too. i seem to have pretty good results with the 100 point level done but spotted something you were mentioning a while back about the firmware ignoring bed mesh even when probed…
There’s been enough changes I don’t even remember anymore. What I’ve done is build a surface in Excel that generates the mesh corrective commands that I can just copy and paste into the terminal. If zooming around at a height of 1 mm or whatever is changing and at some points on the bed it’s 0.9 mm and at some points it’s 1.1 mm I’ll just put those deltas into Excel and generate a new mesh.
Of course this is heavily based on Tone’s earlier work. It’s a good method.
Personally I haven’t found the need to go above 5x5 yet. I’ve also been thinking about surface mapping recently - if the bed correction was moved into warping the G-Code on a computer before sending the sky’s the limit and you could do a 200x200 corrective grid if you really wanted to. And that same technique would allow for precise PCB edging as well as laser and CNC engraving any arbitrary surface. Of course the prerequisite is improving probing first
One of the benefits of CAN, and it’s not a slight one, is that it allows a fixed number of wires to the work head and a connector with relatively few pins. Start controlling all the innard directly and you need a connector with enough pins for the most complicated head.
That’s of course if you even care about common cabling. I would, since it allows the use of drag chain, taking out one kind of random-and-rare disaster involving cable snags.