Marlin 1.1 released!!!

The new Marlin 1.1 firmware has been released with many new features and upgrades!

Here is the description from github site: Marlin 1.1 Release Notes

"Marlin 1.1 represents an evolutionary leap over Marlin 1.0.2. It is the result of over two years of effort by several volunteers around the world who have paid meticulous and sometimes obsessive attention to every detail. For this release, we focused on code quality, performance, stability, and overall user experience. Several new features have also been added, many of which require no extra hardware.

The code has been significantly optimized in several areas, leading to fewer stutters, better delta performance, more reliable USB/Serial communication, and more consistent and deterministic results."

Key improvements are:

• More consistent configuration with sanity-checking.
• Many more boards supported, with sane defaults for most common features. Improved thermal protection, enabled by default with tight margins for error.
• Improved Auto Bed Leveling with Bilinear Mesh and probeless operation.
• Unified Bed Leveling™ – Combining all forms of bed leveling in one package, plus tools like G26 Mesh Validation to improve leveling accuracy even further.
• Option to "fade" leveling compensation out over several layers to save computes on long prints.
• Support for up to 5 extruders with different geometries.
• Support for mixing and switching extruders. Linear Advance compensates for viscosity and pressure to reduce ooze and improve surfaces.
• Dozens of languages including Japanese, Galician, and Simplified Chinese.
• Significantly improved UI performance, especially Graphical Display.
• Display rate adjusts dynamically to prevent print stuttering.
• M600 Filament Change, Nozzle Clean, Nozzle Park, Auto Park on Pause, etc.
• Improved support for Bed Leveling probes and Manual Probing.
• Support for Trinamic steppers, i2c control, steppers as endstops.
• Endstops can use pin interrupts for improved performance.
• M43 Pins Debugging to report about, test, and monitor pins and endstops.
• Print Job Timer
• Sorted SD Card file listings.
• Improved host integration, extended capabilities report, keepalive messages, auto-report temperature, and more!
• Integrated I2C Bus allowing Marlin to interoperate on multiple boards.
• Support for Case Light, RGB LED, LED Strip. Printer events feedback.
• New features too numerous to list here. Read the config files for details!

For complete Marlin documentation and downloads go to the Marlin Homepage:

www.marlinfw.org

GitHub repository:

https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin

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Kamaq 3d printer controller software for embedded Linux systems

Kamaq is a control software that is completely unfamiliar to me. Does anyone have any experiences with it? There are no reviews to be found ...

Kamaq features:

• Web interface with real-time monitoring and feedback via websockets.
• Temperature plots for heaters
• Direct motor control panel
• Nifty print-speed scale slider to adjust printing speed in real-time
• Real-time plot of current layer movements in 2D
• Linux-based RepRap firmware written in Python, with a web-interface in HTML5/JavaScript and websockets. It controls up to 4 stepper motors (axes) via standard USB audio device, end-switches and heaters via GPIO and hw-mon.

Project description:

Kamaq is a 3D-printer (FDM) controller software running on an embedded Linux system. It is capable of controlling a RepRap-style 3D printer, but with different electronics. Stepper motor control is done using a 8-channel (7.1) USB audio device and some class-D audio amplifiers. Endstop switches are monitored via GPIO inputs (interrupt-capable) and temperature control for extruder and heated bed via standard hwmon-compatible ADC's and GPIO-outputs for heater control. The software has a web interface for machine control and monitoring.

RepRap wiki:

http://www.reprap.org/wiki/Kamaq

Kamaq GitHub repository:

https://github.com/yope/kamaq

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How to install simple and effective automatic bed leveling

GuruBrew has published this excellent video tutorial on how to make your own automatic print bed leveling.
It looks easy and it will help you with your calibration and improve print quality. It takes a normally closed micro switch and a small RC servo, customized Marlin firmware and 3d printed probe mechanism.

Here is the video guide:


Thank you for sharing Guru!

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BBP controller for faster 3d printer and expansion flexibility

BBP is a new controller that wants to speed up your printer and provide it with flexibility to expand. It can also be use don various other CNC machines like CNC mills or laser cutters.

Technical specifications:

Microcontroller

• Texas Instrument Sitara AM335x, 1GHZ Cortex-A8 ARM
• 2 Programmable Realtime Units (PRU) to generate really high frequency step and dir signals
• 4GB eMMC
• 512M DDR3 memory
• 10/100M ethernet
• microSD card
• USB Host to connect USB disk, WiFi, Camera .etc
• USB Device interface, shows to the computer as a mass storage device

Stepper drivers

• 5 to 6 DRV8825 stepper drivers
• 1/32 microsteps / step
• Each capable of driving bipolar steppers up to 45V and 2.5A
• Digital control of the current setting for each driver

Outputs

• 3 heaters, 2 for extruder and 1 for HBP
• 6 connectors for fan or LED light belt, all adjustable

Inputs

• 3 Thermistor (ADC) inputs
• 2 Thermalcouple (MAX6675) inputs
• 6 endstops
• 1 connector for external power button

Extensibility

• 50 pins FFC connector for 24 bits TFT LCD and touch screen
• connector for 2 extended steppers
• connector for 3 extended heaters
• Serial connector to print debug log
• Lots of pins broken out, including step, direction and enable pins for the stepper drivers

Here is the comparison of BBP to other popular controller boards: 

BBP KS campaign with much more information:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1177488680/bbp-making-your-3d-printer-faster

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Upgraded Marlin firmware by Scott Lahteine

Scott Lahteine made his Marlin fork with some new and improved features.
Features of his Marlin fork include:

• Cleaner Z display
• SD Listing Sorted Alphabetically
• SD List buffer for fast, reliable SD navigation
• LCD Progress Bar
• Wait Messages (M0 Click me)
• Long filename display
• Print abort message
• "Wait for user" click stays on Info Screen

Those features will probably be coming to Marlin in near future.

If you are brave and/ or like experimenting with Marlin you can get this version now at:

http://github.com/thinkyhead/Marlin

Here is the video overview of the features in action:

LCD display and information show is much better 

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Cura 14.03 with new Ultimaker 2 firmware released!

Ultimaker software just released Cura 14.03. Here is overview from Ultimaker blog:

Setting storage
One of the major changes is that the settings are now stored per machine instead of global for all machines. This means that if you have multiple printers you can keep the optimal settings for each printer with that printer.

TweakAtZ plugin
The “TweakAtZ” plugin has been added by default. This plugin has been made by Steve Morlock, Ricardo Gomez and Stefan Heule. Big thank you to them! Thanks to their community effort you can now change various settings like temperature and speed at certain heights. Giving more control on how your print is made.

New Ultimaker 2 firmware
For the Ultimaker2 a new firmware is supplied with Cura 14.03. This firmware adds a pause option in the tune menu. So you can pause a print on the Ultimaker2. It also contains fixes for a few small bugs that where reported.

Additional changes in Cura

• Improved the LayerView rendering speed
• LayerView now updates during slicing, so you can see the result before it is ready to print spotting problems early on
• Selectable USB printing dialogs, from plugins, with default Basic and PronterfaceUI
• Selection between new grid or line based support material
• Added optional separate speeds for outer and inner shells
• Added Z-Hop feature in the expert settings
• Added setting to configure support material angle from the expert settings, giving better control on where support material is generated
• Various small bugfixes improving print quality

Full features Ultimaker 2 firmware update

• Added pause function during printing
• Added material selection when changing material
• Fixed the move material maintenance function
• Fixed the led brightness on startup
• Retraction settings are saved and restored on reset

https://www.ultimaker.com/blogs/news/2014/03/18/cura-14-03

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mUVe developed improved Marlin firmware

mUVe 3D creators in cooperation  with Tim Schmidt and the Lansing Makers Network developed improved Marlin firmware version that can also work with with laser cutters, UV laser printers and has some more advanced options.


From source article:

This is a huge addition to the functionality of the Marlin firmware and it will allow a huge array of hardware to be run. It’s no longer a firmware for just FFF machines, we can now make laser cutters, and laser based 3D printers. Best of all, it’s a HUGE improvement to print quality and will help your QSil and Sylgard last much much longer than before! Look at all the additions!

• mUVe 3D specific peel move still exists and is a function that can be turned on and off before you compile, so now you can use the firmware on other SLA based machines without edits.

• Use hardware other than Arduino Mega 2560 and RAMPS, you can select the machines on the list that have enough memory to install it. It has grown in size, chips with less memory may be an issue but this hasn’t been investigated yet.

• Firmware defined laser point size for future features such as W/cm^2 calculation and auto-laser-power setting for resins with W/cm^2 data available.

• EEPROM saves the amount of time the laser has been on and will tell you when you boot how many hours and minutes the laser has been used.

• PPM laser pulsing with specific maximum frequency set in Hz.

• Laser pulsing built right into stepper code so there is no added processing time, delays, or otherwise. Full speed printing.

• Configurable laser power on a scale of 1-100.

• Configurable pulses per mm, default of 10.

• Configurable time on for each laser pulse in microseconds, default is 3000.

• Default connection speed lowered to 115200 for compatibility with more computers.

• Built on and compiles with the latest version of Arduino, main file is now Marlin.ino.

Source and download links:

http://www.muve3d.net/press/2014/02/09/highly-improved-firmware-in-alpha/

https://github.com/mUVe3D?tab=repositories

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Sailfish Firmware for faster MakerBots

Jetty's Sailfish firmware brings better performance to most of MakerBot 3d printers. 



From their thingiverse page :

"A Sailfish is faster than a Marlin".

Sailfish is the next generation of the Jetty Firmware. It's faster and has better print quality.

Supports: Replicator 1, ThingOMatic and Cupcake (TBA)

Firmware Manual: wiki.makerbot.com/jetty-firmware

This firmware contains many new features, some of which are: better acceleration, ditto printing, Pause@ZPos, SF50 Volumetric 5D printing.

Feature list: wiki.makerbot.com/jetty-firmware#toc3

Requirements: wiki.makerbot.com/sailfish-firmware-installation-guide

Be sure to check their instruction before installing, but the procedure should be very easy.

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