Best posts made by robotmatt

Hi guys,

I represent a research group at an Australian University. We're looking at commercializing a product and are looking to save on development time. The Duet Ethernet appears to have all the hardware we need already built in a nice design.

Here is a list of what we're looking to achieve:

Drive up to 4 Stepper motors, 2 have their own independent drivers
Control two independent heat chambers.
Control CO2 levels. The CO2 sensor communicates using the RS485 protocol.
Drive a solenoid for CO2 flow
Drive an ultrasonic oscillator (this will likely have its own driver circuit and will only need an IO to control)
Drive 2 air pumps (potentially controlling using PWM or just IO)
Monitor Temperature and humidity via a single I2C sensor
Read up to 6 limit switches
Read 2 proximity sensors
Touch screen for monitoring and some control

Custom ethernet communication protocols are preferable however I'd be willing to adapt to the RepRap Gcode protocol if absolutely necessary.

Webserver for monitoring is a bonus

So my questions are:

1. Do you think this board is capable of doing this? At a glance, I feel it can.
2. How would we go about modifying the firmware to stray away from the RepRap firmware?

Cheers

Thanks for getting back to me! Yes, the RS485 is async so I'll just do up a little transceiver PCB to solve that problem.

The DHT22 just doesn't quite cut it for our application. We need something that can take the grunt of 90degC heat for a decontamination cycle. For the I2C problem, I was considering just using an I2C to RS485 transceiver on the sensor side and putting the two devices on the one bus. Do you see an issue with that?

I'm not too experienced in the structure of RepRap. Does RepRap that contains the low-level drivers such as stepper motor control, etc? Or is it built on top of the low-level drivers implemented by the designer?

Are you able to share or point us in the right direction to some of the low-level modules?

The main modules we'd be after are:
Stepper Drivers (functions such as move(distance) etc)
Ethernet drivers (basic TCP/IP comms that contain send/receive functions)

Our end goal would be to scrap RepRap all together and write all our own control systems but it would be nice to base it off something first We have an ATMEL-ICE for reprogramming the chip directly

Really appreciate the help!
Cheers

Hello again.

Regarding loading firmware...

As mentioned earlier, I'd like to eventually do away with the RRP. I've been playing around with the USB method of uploading firmware and have found it quite cumbersome. I've looked through the schematics and diagrams of the Duet Ethernet and can see that the JTAG interface is broken out but not populated. However on the actual board I have, I can't see anything related to JTAG at all that I can solder a header to.

Am I right in saying that the JTAG interface has been excluded from the production version all together therefore, I'm stuck with uploading via USB? Is there another way I can streamline uploading custom firmware to the board?

Cheers

I thought that might the case. I started using SAM-BA at first because I was already using it. However, I actually just investigated the BOSSAC method which is easily integrated into the IDE I'm using and it's made the development process much more bearable. Thank you