# 3D Printing > 3D Printer Parts, Filament & Materials >  BBP Control Board - Speed Up Your 3D Printer

## Brian_Krassenstein

FastBot, having just launched a Kickstarter campaign for their BBP board, is catering to those who want more power and speed for their 3D printers — as well as laser cutters and CNC machines. Featuring an AM335x, 1GHZ Cortex-A8 processor, FastBot has also developed a firmware for the BBP board to make a ‘high frequency step control signal,’ which is responsible for the higher speeds in 3D printing. They also offer the BBP 1S which is exponentially more powerful, with extra features such as an interface for higher temperature printing and extended interfaces to allow for color printing. Find out more in the full article: http://3dprint.com/50168/kickstarter...ots-bbp-board/


Below is a photo of the BBP board:

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## truly_bent

Any idea whether this board is delta printer ready? I haven't seen any mention of it.

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## adamfilip

I dont get why this would be much better then a rambo board

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## richardphat

> One big problem of 3d printer is the speed, people need to wait for hours to print a simple model. That is because the current control board, like RAMPS, Smoothie, are all powered by Atmel processors, whose frequency are too low to let the motor run fast.



Oh just freaking cut it, do you guys even know what the hell you're talking about? Don't you dare thinking us as brainless people...

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## brbubba

> I dont get why this would be much better then a rambo board


I'm thinking niche application where people are developing printers that can actually hit higher speeds, although I haven't seen any in action.

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## richardphat

It is nearly useless to develop faster electronics, when the physical limitation/ hardware are bottlenecking it. As soon as you increase speed, you're just going to torture your printer faster..... 

Motor noise,Vibration, loosen screw, nozzle jamming, layers that are still way too hot even with active cooling....

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## jack090

Speed is a change direction, and other physical limitation will be dismiss.

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## LambdaFF

> It is nearly useless to develop faster electronics, when the physical limitation/ hardware are bottlenecking it. As soon as you increase speed, you're just going to torture your printer faster..... 
> 
> Motor noise,Vibration, loosen screw, nozzle jamming, layers that are still way too hot even with active cooling....


Agreed, you'll just make a useless pile of goo faster.

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## jack090

It's a fact accuracy and speed is mutex . highter speed get troubled in "Motor noise,vibration, loosen screw, nozzle jamming, layers".  
We need face it and improve to change them.  If research highter speed is wrong, we will lock myself in here and 3d print remain is slow after 10 years.
Don't stop improving it, must try some new direction.

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## LambdaFF

But that's precisely the point man. 

Simple physics say that viscous goo can't be applied much faster. So, if you want to go faster you need to change the technology and the underlying physical properties you aim to leverage. Here the limit is clearly viscosity/cooling management.

Look at the SLA printers. When the guys decided to go faster, they created this oxygen activation process for the resin. The limiting factor was not the laser or its aiming system.

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## Mjolinor

That "simple physics" being a "non-Newtonian fluid".

Hmm, wasn't so simple when I learned about it.  :Smile:

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## jack090

SLA  printer is earliest technology, but still is not mature. Carbon 3D extremely fast, it's DLP not SLA, but it have itselffault. I think they belong to different zone*.
*In fucture, they have their own market share.

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## bonzo

Although I totally agree with you guys, maybe this would help with printing higher poly facets on STLs.
You know, like  how our printers can choke on smaller diameter circles that have a high facet count.
I heard that happens because the motion planner chokes on the math...

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## Alibert

LambdaFF is right.

The limitating factor is NOT how fast you can move your steppers, but how fast you can melt and squeeze the plastic out of the nozzle. Melting takes time, and the faster you go the more friction you get and the more pressure you build up before the nozzle (to the point the hardware fails, bowden tubes springing loose, hobbed wheels grinding etc).

Increasing stepper speed may optimize the total printing time a little bit, increasing extrusion speed will do much and much more. At this point of technology, the extruder is the limiting factor, not the steppers.

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## bonzo

Not when your machine motion and extruder are not fluidly moving below the limits of how fast the plastic can come out of the nozzle because your 8 bit processor is choking on the gcode.




> LambdaFF is right.
> 
> The limitating factor is NOT how fast you can move your steppers, but how fast you can melt and squeeze the plastic out of the nozzle. Melting takes time, and the faster you go the more friction you get and the more pressure you build up before the nozzle (to the point the hardware fails, bowden tubes springing loose, hobbed wheels grinding etc).
> 
> Increasing stepper speed may optimize the total printing time a little bit, increasing extrusion speed will do much and much more. At this point of technology, the extruder is the limiting factor, not the steppers.

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## Alibert

> Not when your machine motion and extruder are not fluidly moving below  the limits of how fast the plastic can come out of the nozzle because  your 8 bit processor is choking on the gcode.


.

Which firmware/hardware combo are you using?

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## richardphat

My thought was sst768 or 1200es are running on real computer cpu and they are still choking....

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## Mjolinor

> My thought was sst768 or 1200es are running on real computer cpu and they are still choking....


They do not interpret Gcode.

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## bonzo

sailfish 7.7 mega 2560..

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## Alibert

> sailfish 7.7 mega 2560..


If the firmware can't keep up with the required moves then I guess either a higher clocking micro is needed, or you could try lowering the precision of your stl model. It does not make sense to have a precision (and thus a lot of facets/short cords) that is far below what your printer can actually achieve. Depending on how the stl was generated this may not be an option and a faster micro may be your only recourse.

Another option is to speed up the calculations as a lot of square root calculations are used. By sacrificing a degree of precision in the calculations a speedup may be achieved. I am looking into that at the moment.

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