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 the final post in a series of posts about how the board was developed.
The darkness gives way to bright skies...
Having solved the heat dissipation issues, I came up with v1.1 as the production version. Which meant I removed most of the header pins since they were already connected to something and cannot be used for anything else. The board was also made slightly smaller, because by now, I had already spun off the MRR ESPE (aka I2S version), knew where to place the 74HC595s for the I2S version, and could afford to try and save board space.
And then v1.1 worked so well for me in my tests, I decided to try and improve it.
So I added the TMC2130 SPI support via jumper settings back to the design, which required quite a bit of routing the traces. And other jumper features like disabling VUSB, and a way to drive the bed MOSFET at a higher gate voltage. Thus was born v1.2.
This was supposed to be the version to be launched. It worked really great. But I still had to tweak it with small improvements (like a debouncing capacitor for the reset button), and eventually ended up with v1.3 as the "final" version to be launched.
And this concludes the series on how the MRR ESPA was born into its current shape. There may still be some really minor tweaks to the MRR ESPA in the future, but I don't expect anything major since the pins on the ESP32, without any expansion, are really limited.
(A series of discussions covering v1.1 to v1.3 can be found here.)
For more information on the MRR ESPA:
Facebook page
Facebook group for users
GitHub repository
MRR ESPA available here
The darkness gives way to bright skies...
Having solved the heat dissipation issues, I came up with v1.1 as the production version. Which meant I removed most of the header pins since they were already connected to something and cannot be used for anything else. The board was also made slightly smaller, because by now, I had already spun off the MRR ESPE (aka I2S version), knew where to place the 74HC595s for the I2S version, and could afford to try and save board space.
And then v1.1 worked so well for me in my tests, I decided to try and improve it.
So I added the TMC2130 SPI support via jumper settings back to the design, which required quite a bit of routing the traces. And other jumper features like disabling VUSB, and a way to drive the bed MOSFET at a higher gate voltage. Thus was born v1.2.
This was supposed to be the version to be launched. It worked really great. But I still had to tweak it with small improvements (like a debouncing capacitor for the reset button), and eventually ended up with v1.3 as the "final" version to be launched.
And this concludes the series on how the MRR ESPA was born into its current shape. There may still be some really minor tweaks to the MRR ESPA in the future, but I don't expect anything major since the pins on the ESP32, without any expansion, are really limited.
(A series of discussions covering v1.1 to v1.3 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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