@TLAS the standard mini thermocouple connector is nearly 17mm wide, so fitting two of them on the thermocouple daughter board would not be feasible.

There are some smaller thermocouple connectors available but I haven't seen any in widespread use. Most thermocouples I see advertised are wire ended, not terminated in a connector.

The Duet3D daughter board works with several different types of thermocouple, not just type K. We have users who extrude very high temperature materials and use other types, and for them including a type K thermocouple connected would be a disadvantage.

So in short, we don't have any plans to do this. The screw terminals seem to work well with any type of thermocouple. If you connect the wires the wrong way round then it is quickly obvious, because the temperature reading goes down when the heater is turned on.

We could do a custom run if sufficient quantity was requested. The minimum quantity that was economical to make would probably be a few hundred. Alternatively you could do your own variant starting from our open source design files.

@dc42
Can you provide any details on the technical development for those of us curious? I’d love to buy that integrated motor set when it is available.

The hole pattern of a nema-17 Motor would logically have been the "ideal" for a toolboard

Why E3D chose a 34mm hole spacing for their Hemera extruder is unfathomable.

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let the Duet team knows that this is also something of interest to us.

But we also are at an early stage of our work regarding this matter.

@Th0mpy the 3.5-dev branch of the Duet3Expansion project includes support for the RP2040.

@dc42 said in Support forPWM Conversion:

@jay_s_uk RS485 is something we may support in future. We're already looking at making a daughterboard to support it.

FYI
Supporting RS485 also opens the door to controlling the output of a plasma cutting system from the cnc controller.
Here is the programmers refererence for Hypertherm RS485 implementation

@Diamondback not yet...

@Marcossf I don't think an active tool distribution board of the sort you envisage is possible without radical changes to the CAN protocols that we use. The CAN bus does not support man-in-the-middle devices, because the ACK but has to be set in real time by the receiving nodes.

We are looking into integrating RFID readers into Duet 3 systems. One possibility is to connect a RFID reader with UART interface to a UART-capable port on the Duet. Another is to connect it to a UART port on a custom expansion board based on a SAMMYC21 or possibly RP2040. If several RFID reads are to be read (e.g. one per tool dock) then RS485-enabled RFID readers could be used.

@sonderzug et al

We have been considering a SAME70 CAN-FD control board designed to use CAN-FD expansion for most functions for a long time now, but need to consider the total stock of these processors available to use before adding another product that uses them.

If we did it Pi hat is one form factor that could be used but may not be optimal.

@ctilley79 just a thought ... if you are good enough to solder on wires, maybe desoldering the existing connectors would be an option for you.

@rilot love the design and the additional display! Are you able to elaborate a bit on the wiring scheme as posted on thingiverse? Especially on what are the names referring to in the excel pic posted?

Conn LCD = connection to lcd panel
Conn sd = ?
Exp1 = ?
Exp2= ?

Would be greatly appreciated!

@jrow I know an electronics tech whose day job is fixing production errors in dense PCBs that hires out her spare time. I'd love to mod a 6HC to 50 or 60VDC.

@3mm the BMG with a pancake nema 17 (in my case a Moon's) weighted in about 290g (75g for the BMG, ~200g for the motor, plus bowden coupler, silicon hose, bowden tube, ..).

The orbiter is 135g, so less than half the weight. It however isn't the weight on the flying extruder I'm concerned about, it's the yanking of the bowden tube (in my case was ~150mm) on my 380mm bed delta that I suspect is the source for artifacts I saw.

I can run 5k acc/600jerk/no input shaping/100mms-150mms, 0.015 PA, 0.6mm retractions with the direct mounted (on a 7cm tall, petg printed stand and tilted) Orbiter V2 with almost none / negligible artifacts.

I wasn't able to do that with my flying BMG.. had to run 3k/300jerk/~70mm/0.4 PA/1.5mm retractions for worse quality than on the current direct drive solution.

@nikscha I think it could be useful for some of those things but I would caution against replacing the strain gauge as the has been tried before for Deltas with the HE280 hotend from SeeMeCNC.

The strain gauge is more accurate and has worked better than accelerometer only. It could be great combined but I wouldn't go entirely over.

@pcr I think you still should have a diode on the input right?

Looking for a single header that will power the inductive probe and accept the signal generated. As well, it should be flexible to offer a few different voltages. I thought that a diode would be required to fully satisfy all the requirements.

@dc42

To be honest: Nothing will prevent me. This is my current setup. But see it like that:
3 wires for X and Y endstops
8 Wires for the two steppers
3 Wires for my enclosure temp sensor
2 Can wires (to the toolboard on the hotend
2 Power for the toolboard
= 18 Wires in total.

That can be reduced to 4 fires from the Mainboard to the gantry (the new tool board) and 4 wires forward to the toolboard on the hotend.
But this is not my only usecase, see things like the carrot feeder which need more than one stepper. And the 3HC is really a big boy for driving two nema14 plus a servo at the end.

I had the idea to bild a "poor door opening thingy" for my v2. My "brain internal" solution would need to steppers, three sensors too.
I could think about a camera moving thingy, like a gimbal which keeps the focus on the hotend. Which would need more than one servo too.

I think that there would be a lot of usecases for a "intermediate" board. The 3HC fits perfectly into the 6HC range. They are perfect if you need big beefy boards with a lot of power. But the Mini 5+ road seems to be a bit under supported here.

@o_lampe brought up the next good usecase: An IDEX printer can profit from such a board too. You can drive X and U with that board and save a lot of wiring

Do not get me wrong David, I understand fully that you can not create a board for every single usecase which somebody brings up. That is logical and can not be done by your time and by the financial impact. But see it from my site:

I buy a Mini5+ for some good reasons: The price and the almost "best" solutions for printers like a IDEX, Voron v0/2.4 etc. The steppers are fine and big enough, I can attach a toolboard or two. Wifi included. A very nice board for a fair price.

I attached the 2 driver daughter board to the Mini5+ because I need 4 steppers for Z and 2 for X-Y. I have one left. (Toolboard on the hotend)
I have now the case that I want to build something like the carrot feeder. What should I do? Use two toolboards? Use one stepper from the expansion and add an toolboard?
Or shall I use the 3HC? That is almost the price of a Mini 5+? That does not feel very right to me to be honest.

And I can not be the only one with this kind of struggle ...

Cheers, Chriss

@aprz As it stands we are not planning on supporting higher than 48V on the 1XD. If your motors need >48V then you need to use a separate supply for the 1XD. If you have a brake on the motor then it may need 24V which would work for the 1XD as well.

The 3HC is unlikely to have a change to >32V soon, but we are looking at maximum voltages for the boards that use the TMC2160 drivers to review the changes needed to go to 48V safely. Our closed loop board that uses a TMC2160 and is in beta uses a TMC 2160 and has a maximum input of 48V

@gixxerfast blinking slowly and continuously in time with the one on the main board is good, it means that it has established time sync with the main board. There is a separate green LED that indicates that the 1XD board is receiving CAN commands from the main board.

@tlas the closed loop board is about to go into the beta test phase.

It also locks you into a single type/generation of SBC.

@veng1
would be interesting to know, how good the firmware handles different (quasi onboard) drivers? Especially for input shaping.
The external toolboards have the advantage of their own CPU and FW to handle their drivers.

@erfreuterstudent
that's a premier for me too, but we'll try.
With a toolchanger you could poll the diameter of the current tool in tpost#.g by using M118 S2 P"toolnumber"
Now the arduino reads this message and sends the aquired data, but here it get's shady for me. It is easy to receive messages and display them on DWC, but reading data into a global variable is unknown to me. I tried it over I2Cport, but fell into the same dark hole...
Maybe @dc42 has a solution now?

@luke-slaboratory there is some discussion of it here https://forum.duet3d.com/topic/14441/higher-input-voltages-for-steppers