Premium 8 bit controller. RAMPS, MKS GEN?

First post, glad to be here. ;)

I built my FolgerTech Kossel RevB a couple years ago and my first RAMPS board gave me problems. It would stop printing after 20+ layers, just stop. So I quickly replaced that RAMPS/Arduino combo with an MKS v1.2 by keyestudio (amazon). This seemed to fix the issue, but introduced a problem all its own. When I home this delta printer, it will act completely normal, moving all 3 carriages up to the end stops, but about 50% of the time when the final tower bounces off the end stop it slows to a crawl and will creep downward (if left alone it will eventually hit the bottom of the printer. Other times it has gone the other direction and tried to ram itself through the end stop. I'm in the habit of watching the printer carefully at startup with my foot floating over the kill switch, if it homes ok, the print will go great, if it does not, I cut the power, unplug everything and try again. Well, I'm getting pretty tired of this and I'm ready to try a new board.

I'd like to get a Duet Wifi, but for how little I use the printer, I cannot justify the expense(about half the original cost of the printer) and smoothieware is not that appealing to me. It seems the other 32 bit options (MKS SBASE, RADDS/Due combo) are not as robust at the moment and will require that I use a new firmware (I'm using Marlin right now).

I'm hoping to find a premium quality RAMPS or MKS gen board. I'm looking for something with high quality MOSFETs and 15A rated connections, automotive style fuses would be a bonus. I would really prefer to get an "all in one" solution like the MKS GEN boards.

I found a premium RAMPs from Tindie, but that ships from Spain and is not an "all in one", I'd much rather find something in the USA.

Any suggestions?

don't know of any usa board manufacturers.
You're pretty much stuck with the chinese firms - or duet.

Unless anyone knows different ?

as far as an 'all-in-one' setup i presume you mean one that comes with onboard stepper controllers.
Seperate controllers are cheap and just pop onto the socket, so don't let that that put you off a board that needs seperate drivers.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by curious aardvark

don't know of any usa board manufacturers.
You're pretty much stuck with the chinese firms - or duet.

Unless anyone knows different ?

as far as an 'all-in-one' setup i presume you mean one that comes with onboard stepper controllers.
Seperate controllers are cheap and just pop onto the socket, so don't let that that put you off a board that needs seperate drivers.

---

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not concerned about the drivers, I'd just rather not have the piggyback arrangement like RAMPS/MEGA.

Since I posted this, I've been looking at Panucatt. They are based in California, but I'm unsure where the boards are made. They do seem concerned with making a quality product and that is my main goal. I want something robust, and I'd like this next board to be the last one I purchase for this printer.

The Azteeg X5 Mini look promising. It's a 32bit board with Wifi, so I'd definitely need to migrate to new firmware. Any thoughts on this board or Panucatt in general are welcomed.

the x5 is smoothieware only.
Not a bad thing.

looks like an awful lot of money for what you get.

When I compare to a Duet or Smoothieboard it seems like a pretty good deal to me. This is provided that the quality is superior to the RAMPS, MKS, etc and will solve the issues I'm having. The price includes your choice of stepper drivers with software voltage tuning.

My value equation goes something like this, keep my cruddy stepper drivers and get a new ramps remix board. This would cost about $40, but I'd still be using the low-end steppers, 8bit processing and I'm not sure if it will solve my issues. If I had the same luck with this that I had with previous boards, I'd need to replace is soon after. I'm trying to make this board an investment in a reliable printer that I could trust to at least home properly.