I got the new Printrboard G2 installed on my 2013 Simple Metal today. The pictures aren’t very clear, but I had to cut away at the edge of the header shroud on the board because it was colliding with a rivet in the frame. Just a heads up if someone else is trying this.
Wait so now the name is printerBoard? Seems like one letter too many.
Huh, I hadn’t noticed that at all.
What is the board for? Alows for more stepper control??
@Matthew_Del_Rosso Well back when I decided to buy it, the G2 looked like it would have Trinamic stepper drivers on it, which would mean nearly silent stepper motor operation. Unfortunately that appears to have changed, and the G2 now ships with Ti’s DRV8825 drivers, which are just as loud as anything as far as I can tell.
Otherwise the G2 appears to support some fancy features (instant stop command execution!) and nicer motor control. I think the real benefit will be felt by people who just get the new 2016 printrbot and have the cloud integration, but I’m interested to see what the G2 has to offer outside of that.
@Chris_Bero by instant stop command execution, do you mean that it is possible to finally pause prints?
@Matthew_Del_Rosso Yes! When you send just the character ‘!’ over the serial connection, the printer freezes immediately, unlike Marlin which had to finish churning through the buffer of g-code. This is one of the few things I’ve been able to test for myself already with the chilipeppr interface.
Synthetos (maker of TinyG and G2) isn’t the same company as Printrbot. Makes sense to me that they would call it a Printerboard instead of using the Printr branding.
@Ryan_Carlyle I thought the new printrboard g2 was still designed by Printrbot though, and just used the g2core firmware?
If Synthetos made the board then the discrepancy makes sense, but it still sounds odd.
@Chris_Bero board was designed by Alden from synthetos for printrbot. Printrbot is manufacturing these boards in their factory in Lincoln. That writing on the board was just an oversight. Board is officially called printrboard g2
Silkscreen error? Gotcha
nice one Chris, if you have a good http://idea.Go with it Chris and the best of http://luck.Remember nothing venture??? nothing gained good luck Chris
with g2 on the board, are you still using serial manual delivery of Code to drive the printer or is it all pushed by the wifi file uploading or sd card losing of pre sliced models? does octoprint or pronterface really have a role left in managing the printer?
@shannon_greim G2 doesn’t have an sd slot, and the retrofit doesn’t come with a wireless antenna from what I can tell.
Octoprint doesn’t work with it because the G2 uses JSON not gcode, I doubt pronterface does either.
I was using chillipeppr to process gcode and send the JSON to a Pi with the G2 connected.