Electronic boards review
RepRap present I’ll dive right into some of the electronics you can safely choose today, some are still quite new, but most are still based on the Atmel MEGA or derivative parts used on the RAMPS setup. These could all be called the safe and reliable options, as they have well established firmwares and many RepRap based machines are already setup to use them in one form or another. Most of them are running an Atmel 2560 MEGA at 16Mhz, but a few are starting to run at 20Mhz for a little more processing power as this mocrocontroller is forever being pushed harder and harder with new firmware revisions.
Feature
As a side note and printing tip here is that I would always recommend using an SD card for printing anything, you get a much better data transfer rate from SD card than any serial link, this will always lead to better prints and you will get less issues with reliability and generally less problems especially if you are starting to print at faster speeds. Even with higher speed transfer from SD card you will reach a limit with how many steps the Atmel MEGA can clock out to your stepper motors and how much acceleration it can process, it’s possible to experience slow-down and artifacts caused by only modest processing power and now quite complex firmware getting ever packed with features. Optomisation of firmware is also constant and continues to also improve the chances of more ports being done in the near future to higher powered microcontrollers.
Rumba board - stepper driver close up REPRAPMAGAZINE
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