Another update on the MRR ESPA 3D printer control board based on the ESP32.
The smoke that came from plugging in the board to 12V power was narrowed down to... insufficient trace widths. The trace widths for the heated bed and hotend were too thin. So when they start to draw current, the traces get hot, and melt the PCB, giving off smoke. So that's the problem with the heating side that will need to be fixed.
Otherwise, the motor movements seem to be okay. Tried homing and it works. Connected it to an inductive sensor, and that triggered fine too. Here's a short video of it doing some test moves using gcode that basically makes it draw a square.
I keep having problems trying to get my MKS TFT32 touchscreen controller to work on the AUX1 connector. After troubleshooting, I think the problem could be my MKS TFT32 is... a bit fried. It may have some issues on its TX/RX pins. Because when I use other microcontrollers (a M5Stack, and an Arduino Nano) to send and receive gcode with TX/RX pins, those gcodes went through okay. I think, in my previous rounds of testing, I could have damaged my MKS TFT32. Oh well...
The next update will resolve the trace width issue. The bidirectional level shifter will also be dropped to use a simple voltage divider on the ESP32's RX pin. Hopefully, I can get the next version sent for PCB production and get it by early April.
Note: Issue fixed. Pre-launch version now available here. Some information on this has been updated here.
The smoke that came from plugging in the board to 12V power was narrowed down to... insufficient trace widths. The trace widths for the heated bed and hotend were too thin. So when they start to draw current, the traces get hot, and melt the PCB, giving off smoke. So that's the problem with the heating side that will need to be fixed.
Otherwise, the motor movements seem to be okay. Tried homing and it works. Connected it to an inductive sensor, and that triggered fine too. Here's a short video of it doing some test moves using gcode that basically makes it draw a square.
I keep having problems trying to get my MKS TFT32 touchscreen controller to work on the AUX1 connector. After troubleshooting, I think the problem could be my MKS TFT32 is... a bit fried. It may have some issues on its TX/RX pins. Because when I use other microcontrollers (a M5Stack, and an Arduino Nano) to send and receive gcode with TX/RX pins, those gcodes went through okay. I think, in my previous rounds of testing, I could have damaged my MKS TFT32. Oh well...
The next update will resolve the trace width issue. The bidirectional level shifter will also be dropped to use a simple voltage divider on the ESP32's RX pin. Hopefully, I can get the next version sent for PCB production and get it by early April.
Note: Issue fixed. Pre-launch version now available here. Some information on this has been updated here.
No comments:
Post a Comment