Gigabot conversion

[tuomas]

Hello,

Quick question regarding on integrating the duet board to a bit specific system.

Our application: We have a old gigabot printer that we use on printing material that is pumped via small hose to the print head. That means, we are not using the extruder and heated bed (although they can be there, just not being used). We basically just need the motors to move the print head and the bed.

Problem: The mainboard of the gigabot printer is old (maybe azteeg X1). We need to pause the printing quickly when we run out of material and with that mainboard it can take a long time before the printing actually stops.

We are now considering changing the mainboard to help with the problem. Gigabot recommends Azteeg X3 Pro, which seems to be out of stock everywhere. With some googling I found the duet3D and got interested of that. Do you think that we could replace our board with e.g.,
Duet 3 Mainboard 6HC + paneldue to get better controllability to our system. How complicated is the process? Is it possible to later integrate for example the pump or some valve controller to this board as well?

Thanks for your feedback!

[oliof]

@tuomas that should be relatively straightforward. I haven't used it myself but reprapfirmware has some support for controlling pumps in conjunction with movement and custom triggers to pause (for example if you have a sensor to see when you need to refill your material). I suggest you study the wiki at duet3d.dozuki.com -- it has a lot of info. It also is almost always possible to find a thread on the forum, although the search feature is temperamental at times.

[T3P3Tony]

@tuomas apologies for the delay in the reply. As @oliof has already said this is totally do-able. And the actions on pause and other triggers are defined by macros you write so you could (for example add a trigger on material low if you wanted that came to a graceful stop.