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PLANNING: New firmware
Samuel Pinches
Posts: 2,997Administrator
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Updating the firmware is easy, yes, just a binary file on an SD card.
An ESP looks easy to integrate via serial, even with the stock firmware: e.g. see here or hereย
However, I don't know that we have enough people or resources to be able to create a new firmware from scratch? My dream would be to get one of these existing mainstream open source firmwares to work. At the moment, 32 bit 3D printer firmwares are a massive mess - I posted a little about this on my blog.
Here are a list of the potential options that I can see could be worth considering - ordered by what I think is most viable
1. Try to get the same Arduino 1.1.X firmware to work, as on the A5.
This could be easily possible using theย STM32duino.com platform, and might be a nice easy win - to give people an option to play with in the meantime.ย I imagine that this would have to be run headless, with no colour LCD support - instead connected to a computer or raspberry pi for running control and interface. Alternatively, with correct pin mapping, and a custom cable, I'm sure it would be possible to connect a standard marlin-compatibleย black and white LCD to the A5S motherboard. There's a project that appears to have successfully done this on a different 3D printer model already hereย with a github repo here! ST Micro themselves created a dev board with a working version of Marlin here.
2. Get Marlin 2.0 working on STM32F1
The next best thing I think could be to actually try to help get the Marlin 2.0 HAL layer completed for the STM32 platform - it looks like this is not yet completed.ย
3. Implement Smartto
Geeetech have created their own open source STM32 firmware, with support for a colour LCD interface. I wonder if it would be worth trying to implement this? It could also be an easy win potentially?
4. Recreate stock firmware with up to date marlin
I think the current firmware is based on a version of marlin that is so old, that I don't think it's worth trying to update it, but I'm sure it will definitely come in handy to understand pinouts etc. But, I wonder if there is a way we could copy the same "dual brain" architecture using FreeRTOS. However, this would be far, far outside of my skill level...
5. Adapt Smoothieware for STM32F1
The other major 32-bit 3D printer isย Smoothieware. This is a popular firmware running on a few different boards at the moment, but not yet supported on STM32. There is a project thatย started but appears to have abandonedย trying to get STM32 support developed. But, then there has been some recent progress....
https://github.com/Geeetech3D/Smartto-Eclipse
I think that Patreon thing probably pre-empts other options. Going for Marlin is probably a better course unless there's some killer feature in other things. Then again, these things can often hit delays. Do you have a link to this Patreon project as I have no idea what he's doing?
I'm not too worried about the LCD support thing as it may not directly translate to ours. I have some ideas about what I'd like to see in the UI also. Though I guess the question is whether a Marlin release would be easy to integrate the LCD stuff into or whether we'd be faced with the dual-brain stuff again.
I might have a poke around so let's keep this alive. I'd like to see a basic "Hello World" thing going on with the LCD and also see that the original firmware could be restored.
One of my main deals with the ESP would be that it would be nice to get a text or some other notification when the print was finished. But it opens up many possibilities.
Quick question then: How is contention dealt with? I.e. if I am printing from the SD card, how is gcode incoming on the serial/usb dealt with typically? Sorry, this is getting a little off-topic.ย Never mind. Looks like there is a bunch of information on that linked site. I'll do some reading.
I read in previous posts that marlin does not support color LCD... we have some information on our LCD? Some high-definition image or generic information on what do we mount?
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