Master- Slave Approach in DUET-2

GeorgeP

Hi Guys,

I have been working in 3D printing and always been curious of the various possibilities that it has.

Duet is a growing community and i believe I can get all my answers here. I have been following this forum and reading different posts that pop up and now I believe I need your help in solving mine.

I am trying to build a machine that has 3 motors for the axis, and around 12 extruder motors that can be programmed to work in different combinations.

I would also like to add sensors and other hardware(sensors that could not be part of 3D prining, but for monitoring) using the I/O pins on the boards.

I have my eyes set on the Duet 2 WiFi but for the amount of pins I will be using in future I would like to cascade two boards. The two boards should communicate with each other and should be evaluated on a common firmware/software.
i will also need to use the DuetX5 i believe.

I also need help in the firmware because i am not very well versed with programming a controller.

Thanks in advance

T3P3Tony

@georgep Hi George, while what you want to do is technically possible it is a huge amount of work to implement. On the positive side when the Duet 3 comes out it will be even more expandable than the Duet 2 and may well allow you to implement your design.

GeorgeP

The Duet 3 looks promising and would like to know when it will be out in the market.Looking forward to working with it but price is also a factor i would look at... Can you spare me more details on the Duet3.

Meanwhile i am still thinking if two Duet2 and two Duex5 interconnected as M/S.

elmoret

@georgep https://www.duet3d.com/duet3

GeorgeP

how many extension boards can be connected ti the Duet3??? in a video is saw 2 extension boards. Is it possible to cascade as many as we want???

dc42

@georgep said in Master- Slave Approach in DUET-2:

how many extension boards can be connected ti the Duet3??? in a video is saw 2 extension boards. Is it possible to cascade as many as we want???

We've designed it to allow a lot of expansion boards to be cascaded. I'm aiming to have it working with at least 8.

GeorgeP

@dc42 said in Master- Slave Approach in DUET-2:

iming to have it working with at least 8.

wow... That sounds really cool... looking forward to that... When can we see it in the stores??

GeorgeP

The Duet3 with the expansion board works on a similar master slave approach right??!! where the Duet3 is the master and the expansions are the slaves.
What IC does the expansion board run on?

dc42

The expansion board has an ATSAME51 processor, which has a 120MHz ARM Cortex M4F core.

GeorgeP

@dc42 Do you think the duet2 can be tweaked to fit in a master slave using SPI/ UART with another board??

dc42

@georgep said in Master- Slave Approach in DUET-2:

@dc42 Do you think the duet2 can be tweaked to fit in a master slave using SPI/ UART with another board??

The technical difficulties would be substantial, also I suspect that the master would need more RAM than the processor on the Duet has, unless we removed some major feature to free up RAM.

You can already drive 12 stepper motors independently using a Duet + DueX5 + 2 external drivers. Another user already did a firmware patch to support another 2 external drivers, giving 14 in total.

GeorgeP

@dc42

WoW... 2 more external drivers! where do we connect the 2 external drivers? if the Duet2 is connected to the duex5. Where are the additional pins for more drivers? Do we connect it in the display pins?

dc42

See the references to CONN_LCD at https://duet3d.dozuki.com/Wiki/Using_external_stepper_motor_drivers.

GeorgeP

Really cool.
12 stepper drivers sounds good to me.
It is a good start.

Cant wait to start my project. Will come back with more queries as I progress.

Thank You

GeorgeP

Eager to see the Duet 3 in action too. Is there any way to get my hands on a prototype?

GeorgeP

I would love to contribute in some way too.

dc42

Prototypes are very expensive to make because the PCB production and especially the assembly costs are very high for small numbers of boards. So we have only a few Duet 3 prototypes. We've not yet decided whether we will make pre-production boards as we did for Duet WiFi, or go straight to production.

GeorgeP

Well i am sure it will be worth the wait... 8 Expansion boards is like a dream come true. You guys have taken expansion to a whole new level .