MakerFarm 8" i3v Prusa build by Printbus

[printbus]

Really like what you've done. I copied a lot of your wire management moves a while back. I'm curious about what drove the desire to upgrade from ramps to smoothieboard?

One, I started looking at the mess I had on the electronics side of the printer and figured there had to be a simpler way. The Arduino/RAMPS/stepper driver stackup, the heat bed relay, a triple MOSFET switch board added to provide more switch controls than RAMPS offers, a 5v/12v fanout board to deal with the extra power distribution, and all the wiring in-between. Two, I spent several days putting together a cross reference showing the mapping flow from MEGA2560 processor pins to the Arduino 2560 schematic, the Arduino 2560 board (which is marked different in some ways than the schematic), the RAMPs schematic, and the RAMPS board (which is also labeled different from the schematic), and simply concluded the almost incoherent mapping was nuts. Three, then there's the nibble data transfers with the LCD that would get out of sync and garble up my display data far too often...

Four, in general, I think Marlin has seen it's day. I've never had much of anything good to say about Arduino base Marlin is built on except it's great for kids building simple school projects. Having been around a long time, Marlin has underwent countless mods. Some of these have been made by people who understand programming microcontrollers, but many were not. The lack of consistent coding style is frustrating in trying to review Marlin code. Marlin is just getting more and more complex as far as processing needs, and if the MEGA2560 processor isn't up against it's bandwidth limit, it will be soon. The latter drove me to a 32-bit processor solution, not just an integrated board solution like RAMBO or RUMBA, and I wanted to jump to a fresh start of a firmware baseline, perhaps better designed from the ground up for what it is doing. And perhaps a firmware baseline subjected to more revision scrutiny than Marlin.

So why Smoothieboard and not some other 32-bit solution? I admit I could have or should have probably done more research on that. Sure there are other 32-bit options either in the pipeline or already on the table. I guess I'd say with Smoothieboard I'm using a product with around two years of legacy behind it now. I'm not sure how many other 32-bit solutions can say that. Firmware is still arguably a bit weak, but the basic functionality for our type of 3D printer is there. I've seen a few reliability quirks, but I'm still early in the game with it. It's also too soon to say whether I see any substantial difference in the printing process or in print quality from the tweaked Marlin baseline I was running, but those weren't significant factors in wanting to switch.