The MRR ESPA is a 3D printer control board based on the ESP32 micrcontroller. It runs Marlin firmware, and works best with the custom fork of Marlin that supports the ESP3D web interface. This is a series of posts about how the board was developed.
The light at the end of the tunnel...
I thought I had solved all the problems with heat dissipation by v1.0, but unfortunately, that was not the case, and it required a minor revision, which was why v1.01 was created. Still, I had big dreams for v1.0, thinking it would be the "production version". And in order not to complicate things, I decided to focus on just the basics for v1.0, which was why TMC2130 SPI support via jumper settings was removed.
Well, it was around this time that JLCPCB was offering solder mask of other colours at the same price as green, so I decided to try out some other colours for v1.01 since I needed to do the revision for trace width.
You can see that the board has a lot of unused "real estate". That was because Simon Jouet was already working on the I2S stepper stream in the HAL, allowing the ESP32 to drive stepper motors using an I2S stream via 74HC595 chips. So I had intentionally left space on the board so that I can eventually work on an I2S version of the board (which eventually became the MRR ESPE).
(I didn't really like yellow PCBs. I have tried all the colors: green, yellow, blue, red, black, and white. My conclusion is that I like all those colors except yellow.)
The next post will be the last of this series, when I touch on the road to a final production version.
(A series of discussions covering v0.8 to v1.01 can be found here.)
For more information on the MRR ESPA:
Facebook page
Facebook group for users
GitHub repository
MRR ESPA available here
The light at the end of the tunnel...
I thought I had solved all the problems with heat dissipation by v1.0, but unfortunately, that was not the case, and it required a minor revision, which was why v1.01 was created. Still, I had big dreams for v1.0, thinking it would be the "production version". And in order not to complicate things, I decided to focus on just the basics for v1.0, which was why TMC2130 SPI support via jumper settings was removed.
Well, it was around this time that JLCPCB was offering solder mask of other colours at the same price as green, so I decided to try out some other colours for v1.01 since I needed to do the revision for trace width.
You can see that the board has a lot of unused "real estate". That was because Simon Jouet was already working on the I2S stepper stream in the HAL, allowing the ESP32 to drive stepper motors using an I2S stream via 74HC595 chips. So I had intentionally left space on the board so that I can eventually work on an I2S version of the board (which eventually became the MRR ESPE).
(I didn't really like yellow PCBs. I have tried all the colors: green, yellow, blue, red, black, and white. My conclusion is that I like all those colors except yellow.)
The next post will be the last of this series, when I touch on the road to a final production version.
(A series of discussions covering v0.8 to v1.01 can be found here.)
For more information on the MRR ESPA:
Facebook page
Facebook group for users
GitHub repository
MRR ESPA available here
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