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Gen7 Board-ARM v2.0

Generation 7 Electronics Board-ARM v2.0 is the first Gen7 based on an ARM, an LPC1114FN28. Like all earlier Gen7s it's still easily DIY-able, because this FN28 comes with through-hole pins spaced at 0.1“ (2.54 mm).

Compared to earlier Gen7s it's considerably faster. It has been demonstrated to deliver as many as 130'000 steps/second to the stepper driver, so 1/32 microstepping is no longer a bottleneck. Even at 1/128 microstepping one can achieve reasonable performance.

Status: refined circuitry design & board done.

Firmware upload

Gen7-ARM runs Compilation Environments. Not yet featured with Configtool, so it has to be compiled using the Makefile on the command line.

Details on this TBD.

For details on uploading firmware in general see LPC1114 Bootloader.

TODO

Board-ARM v2.0 is the latest development, so let's collect here experience and possible enhancements for the next version.

Make auto-reset work

For an idea using the serial control lines see http://www.mikrocontroller.net/topic/281717#2977141. Not sure wether this can really work for programming, though and for printing it's sometimes even counterproductive (like when continueing an aborted print).

History

December 2012

Board of the first ARM based Gen7 prototype.

Board of the first ARM based Gen7 prototype.

The first ARM based Generation 7 Electronics was created. It was mostly a Gen7 v1.4.1 with the ATmega replaced by an NXP LPC1114FN28. It worked on the spot.

February 2013

RepRap user Bobc was the first to run a printer with a Gen7-ARM:

Bobc's proof of concept video

See also his RepRap forum post. To get a working firmware he ported Teacup Firmware to ChibiOS. Later investigations showed that this choice didn't exactly result in the best possible performance, but this didn't matter at that time.

gen7_board-arm_2.0.1447465996.txt.gz · Last modified: 2018/05/27 16:10 (external edit)