Hi,
I am in the process of building a Lowrider, with the intent of using as many parts as I can from my old Cocoon Create Touch.
The stepper motors and worm drives seem to fit ok.
Can I reuse the Motherboard?
It runs an Atmel ATMEGA2560-16AU microcontroller. It is thus the equivalent of an Arduino Mega 2560 clone.
Is it just a matter of flashing the firmware?
Thanks
Adrian
Funnily enough I did exactly this (minus the control board).
Different models of the Wanhao got sold with different steppers, I found that the steppers don’t have enough power for the Z axis. I tried it and they were either quickly running too hot or skipping steps. Getting steppers with 45Ncm is cheap enough though, I just ordered them for €10 a piece locally, although you can get them cheaper from China. But there is no harm in starting with what you have.
The Melzi control board should be fine for the purpose, you could either wire up the Y steppers serially or use the extruder driver for the second Y axis, but you’ll have to do a bit of trickery in the pins.h file in Marlin since it expects to have at least one extruder driver assigned. It already has 2 Z ports, so that’s simple.
Flashing Marlin on the Melzi for the first time might be a bit tricks, see here. On mine it’s not a 2560, it’s an ATmega1284p. There is a slight chance that you’d have to remove a few firmware features for it to fit into the smaller memory. I just went with a MKS Gen L, which is cheap and fine for the purpose and lets me use more modern stepper drivers to boot.
Thanks Frederik for the information and encouragement.
I will look at getting the stronger stepper motors for the Z axis as you suggested.
If I wire the Y steppers in series ( I assume just double the wires up into the Y terminals?) will it have enough power to run both Stepper motors?
With the 2560 board, you mention smaller memory, how much smaller than your MKS board? I assumed I could flash the new firmware from my windows computer to the board, is there more to it?
Will I be able to use the Cocoon touch screen with the new firmware.
Sorry for all the questions, a steep learning curve, but I’m enjoying it!
Adrian
Doubling up the wires at the Y terminals gives you a parallel connection. You need to daisy chain them instead. There are wiring diagrams here that show what’s correct.
Right, read the Electronics section on the v1 site on how to wire up the steppers.
I missed that you wrote “Cocoon Create Touch”, I thought you had a Cocoon Create (same as my Duplicator i3). Your board does actually have a ATmega2560 (like my MKS Gen L), so storage should not be an issue. However it seems it’s not supported in Marlin 2.0 yet (especially the touch screen). There is a Marlin 1.1.8 fork for it, but I don’t know whether that supports all of the features needed for the lowrider.
If you want to use electronics that’s different from the ones that Ryan provides firmware for, you have to compile it yourself. That requires setting up PlatformIO or Arduino and changing the configuration to match your hardware. If that sounds daunting, I would suggest to ditch your board and display and pick one of the supported boards (e.g. a mini rambo) and get a reprapdiscount graphic smart controller.