I have been following this forum since I decided to build a DLP 3d printer and the first thing I missed was an electronic board that could handle the printing process by it's own, without a PC like almost any FDM 3d printer.
I wanted to make my own board and I have some programming skills but I lacked a good electronics background, so I started to learn pcb design and electronics. Now I'm still a bit newbie to the electronics world but I have a first prototype in a protoboard (that can handle one stepper motor, a 16x2 display, some buttons, and powers the pi by itself to avoid extra power cables) and a first piece of software that reads the files generated in Creation Workshop and moves the stepper motor.
The problem I found is that the Raspberry Pi is not capable of doing realtime tasks like sending step/dir pulses to the stepper drivers, and the motors are not moving smoothly. This could cause step missing because sometimes the motion stops and starts abruptly in the middle of a move.
As I don't want to add an Arduino to the mix, because it will start to make the thing bulky and more expensive, I'm working on a new prototype with an integrated motion control chip that will handle the real time tasks by itself, so that the Raspberry Pi only needs to send target position commands
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
That being said, what would you want to have in a raspberry pi shield for your DLP 3d printers?
- 2 stepper drivers (or 3?)
- 16x2 display and buttons for menus and headless working
- Servo outputs?
- Some switch inputs
- additional SD card reader? (the SO uses the rpi one, but there are a pair of USB ports available to use a pen drive)
- ...?