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as the title says just curious as to who is using the Smothieboard controller, and how do you find it?
I've been using one for a couple of months I replaced a Ramps board and I have to say I find it much much better, I can print quicker the heated bed is quicker at getting up to temp and the network interface is very handy also setting the Currnet for the motors in firmware is a very good idea indeed.
I am building my first printer using a smoothie board I will let you know once I have dialled it in attempt my first test prints.
Hi Everyone
I am currently looking to replace my RAMPS with a Smoothieboars.
Does anyone have any further updates on this?
Rgs
I migrated my MakerFarm i3v from RAMPS/Marlin to Smoothieboard v1.0a x5/Smoothieware in early 2015. Like cwaa said, the ability to change the printer configuration by editing a text file is pretty slick. I should never have to compile my own Smoothieware build. In fact, I think it's been over a year since I bothered fetching an updated binary file. What I have had has been working fine as it is.
If you haven't seen it, the primary information repository is at http://smoothieware.org/
There's also the #smoothieware channel on freenode IRC. There's usually people involved with the board and firmware development available there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cwaa
I would like to switch to smoothie but im afraid my limited skills wouldnt let me figure out how to make the changes necessary in the firmware text file to emulate what I have today :)
Of course, the IRC channel and google forum would be there to help you out.Quote:
Originally Posted by dunginhawk
You could always download the firmware and starting looking at the configuration file, even before purchasing hardware. The documentation on the smoothieware.org site is pretty extensive - there are step by step guides for setting up a 3D printer, a laser cutter, and a CNC machine. Then there is also general detail provided for each of the configurable features in the firmware. Knowing how your printer is currently configured is actually a pretty strong plus, as opposed to starting from scratch. The pin numbering scheme took a bit to get used to, but other than that I don't recall struggling with it.
Note: If you use Simplify3D, you never want to admit to it in at least the Smoothieware IRC channel. Being closed and for-profit, the Smoothie developers outright declare Simplify3D as being incompatible with Smoothie and pretty much refuse to help those people using it.
I may be the odd one out here. Dumped my Smoothieboard and went to a DuetWiFi.Quote:
Originally Posted by zx81
As others have said if you use Simplify3D forget it!
They have supposedly been working on a more modern smoothie for well over a year. You may want to look at the blog relating to that. It hasn't been updated in about a year, so it doesn't give one any idea on the progress of a newer board with better stepper drivers, better processor, and support for more stepper motors or heaters. The documentation on the current one is very good but I consider the board past it's prime.
Well, I use Simplify3D with Smoothie and it currently seems to be fine. I had a few hang issues before, but not since updating Simplify3D to v3. You just *do not* want to ask for help with it, at least not in the IRC channel.
I wouldn't wait for the new smoothieboard. It comes up in the IRC channel fairly regularly. The board developers simply will not commit to a promise date. It probably doesn't help that there will be, as I understand it, different versions. The "pro" version will have an FPGA core on it too yet. It has been apparent that there's been a major push on smoothieware firmware evolvement this year. It could be that the developers wanted that TCO first in order to establish a fairly solid baseline that would then be migrated to the new board, but that's just me guessing.
True, the current v1.0 smoothieboard may not be pushing the current envelope, but it's farther along the evolution path than an 8-bit Atmel ATMEGA processor with a RAMPS shield.
Quote:
Originally Posted by printbus
The Duetwifi has a 32 bit processor. That alone doesn't make one board substantially better than another that I can see. There are a number of other things that are different. The stepper drivers are much better. The duet has expansion capabilities that the Smoothie does not. I'm not an electrical engineer but they are certainly different and one might want to make comparisons based on desirability of certain features.
Agreed. The question on the table was whether anyone had updates on replacing RAMPS with a Smoothieboard, which is what I've tried to address. I'll clarify that I wasn't trying to come across as a Smoothieboard fan-boy. There's probably some number of boards that can be argued as "better" than smoothie, especially viewed from the needs of a particular user. Even in early 2015 when I bought my Smoothieboard I was aware it wasn't the latest thing out there. But my priorities at the time were in migrating to a board with a proven track record, immediate availability, access to support, having a firmware solution not built on Arduino, and where firmware development was occurring with more structure and test than what Marlin had at the time.Quote:
Originally Posted by tpete61
Hey all, Arthur from the Smoothie project here with my 2 cents :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by printbus
Quote:
Originally Posted by tpete61
I want to address these. For over a year, S3D had a bug that caused it to produce insanely bad gcode, that would cause severe slow downs on 8-bit firmwares, and very occasionally crashes on Smoothie firmware.Quote:
Originally Posted by printbus
S3D was extremely unhelpful with this issue ( and even outright agressive at times, going as far as censoring their forums when the issue was mentionned by their users, and denying the issue exists months after they were told about it ).
It was very easy to fix on their side, but they wouldn't.
It was very hard to fix on our side, but they wouldn't help us in any way. In the end, dozens of people and thousands of hours of work were involved on the Smoothie side of things, where that was not necessary at all if S3D had helped. After all this work a fix was developped on the Smoothie side. And some months after, S3D silently fixed the issue.
Because of this, *some* of the Smoothie developers are fairly upset at S3D.
However, many people get help with S3D in the Smoothie community on a day to day basis.
Just because some people refuse to help doesn't mean you won't get any help.
Some of us also refuse to help with closed-source clones for example, but others will help, so in the end, it's just a matter of some people not being willing to spend their free time helping on things they don't want to help with. I don't think you can blame them, it's volunteer work ...
And again : *others* do help, so all is good if you take a step back ...
There are dozens of volunteers involved in the development. I can't go see volunteers who do this on their hobby times and tell them "Hey Todd, you got to finish this by monday or I'll report you to HR" ...Quote:
Originally Posted by printbus
So no we can't have timetables.
What I can say is it's a collosal project, it's going very well, a lot of work is being done, and there is stuff happening all the time.
It's going to be awesome :)
That's not a problem. What's causing the most delays right now is simply how collosal in scope the project is :)Quote:
Originally Posted by printbus
Cheers all :)
Arthur, thanks for clarifying. It's great to see you posting on 3DPrintBoard.
Arhur wit this in mind, I also run S3D, what other oprions are there fr software?
PS. I just ordered. 4xc and 5xc this week :) :)
Well first let me insist that S3D does work with Smoothie now, so if you like that, you can use that.Quote:
Originally Posted by scalci
If you want to look at alternative, the classics are Slic3r, and Cura.
Nice for the board order :) If you need help with anything you can email me directly at wolf.arthur@gmail.com
Also checkout the DuetWifi very comparible to the Smoothieboard/Ware