Working on a Raspberry Pi shield for DLP 3d printers

[ciclopez]

Nice to see other people working on similar projects, it looks very promising

Sorry, I don't know any chip that integrates multiple stepper drivers + controller all in one.
If you are looking for a motion controller alone to use with your Pololu stepper driver modules, I started my project using the TMC429-LI, it sends step/dir pulses for up to 3 stepper drivers, uses SPI as interface and handles the end-stop switches, maybe it works for you. I finally preferred to use multiple TMC5130 because the motion controller is integrated and simplifies the PCB, it can use SPI or UART as interface.

[PacManFan]

[danielm]

ciclopez:
Thanks for the info regarding TMC429. It seems that this chip is what I was looking for. Already ordered 1pcs in SOP24 package for prototyping and 2pcs in QFN32 package. I would probably prefer QFN32 for production as only this version offers 2 switch inputs per all 3 steppers. Do you have any experience with hand soldering of QFN32?

Btw how do you perform chip-select for 3 SPI slaves from RPi? Do you use external multiplexer? Or combination of SPI and UART?

Good luck with testing

PacManFan:
My current SW stack consists of three components: Cloud server which does the slicing, Printer client which renders sliced data and Web-based GUI. I think in current state it would be hard to integrate. However, in the production phase I would like to provide small Python library which in my opinion could be used for integration into CW.

[ciclopez]