Multi-Syringe Extruder Programming Help

[aptek]

Hello everyone!

I am a mechanical engineering student and my senior design team was tasked with quite a unique project. We were to design a new type of extruder. The goals were to create an extruder that could extrude gels from multiple syringes. This has been done using air pressure, but our objective was to achieve this using mechanical pressure. The catch was that we could only use one motor for extruding. The outcome was a revolver type extruder with one stepper motor switching the syringes and one motor applying pressure through a lead screw. The extruder is to be mounted on a fairly standard 3D printer that uses Arduino.


Our issue is that none of us are particularly skilled at programming. We were initially hoping that we could simply find an open-source program to run this thing and tinker with it until we could control all the motors, but that is proving much more complex. Ideally, the entire printer would be controlled through LabView, as that is what we are all most familiar with.

Anyway, does any one have any suggestions for what software we should use, or what other resources we should look into?

[Mjolinor]

The skills required to programme this into Marlin are pretty basic. You would need to define your own colour change GXXX command and you would need a reference input from the drum. After that you just need to send it a number which represents the extruder you want. You would need a table of values for how empty a particular extruder is in order to load a different extruder but generally nothing too hard there.

If you want to use Labview then I think you could do worse than look at LinuxCNC and do away with the Arduino altogether. Getting Labview to talk to LinuxCNC should not be too hard.

[3dkarma]

You could readily adapt Marlin for this. Use tool-change G-code to drive a servo to rotate your syringes cylinder. Your idea of a lead screw with a stepper motor should work well to plunge the syringes.