I have a dual extruder head that uses DC motors with encoder wheels. The x,y,z steppers also have encoders. Is there a way to drive the DC motors and use their encoders with Marlin on RAMPS or similar? It would be nice if the steppers could also be used in closed loop.
Not RepRap, but I believe the Mojo does that. @Whosa_whatsis showed me the innards of the Mojo cartridge - it had a simple dc motor for the filament feed, iirc.
This sounds really cool, can you provide pictures of what you mean? Do you have 1 motor and 2 hot ends?
It would be better to read the dents in the filament that the extruder creates. You would then know if the drive was slipping and could compensate or pause the print.
For the XYZ movements an encoder with a feedback loop would be great.
It’s two motors that feed filament into a single heated block that has two flow channels. The filament feed is also perpendicular to the hot end. It works, but I’m figuring out what would be involved to make a frankenstratasys bst 768 so I can easily change parameters for finer layers without doing a bunch of software hacking. I’m not even sure if finer layers is an option considering it uses the Catalyst software on a remote PC, therefore brain transplant.
Detecting flow by notches is a great idea but I’m not sure there is enough of them. There isn’t room as it is. I don’t want to be driving DC motors on the extruder without some sort of feedback loop.
How about a rubber idler wheel on the filament with an optical encoder?