Placa M3

[Migudama (Miguel Damaceno)]

Hello. What is the difference between the Nano M2 board and the M3 board?
What did you add to the M3?

[dougl]

Nobody here created the M2 or M3 Nano boards. But they are pretty much the same or at least they use the same software to run them.

[vukasin (Vukasin Nikolic)]

This has been covered in a different thread

If anybody gets an M3 Nano (not M2 throw that away) don't trash the software

The major differences are there’s two new headers one that does “multiplexing button” and another that does PWM. Mostly the button in the upper left does a hardware pause. So you can have a pause button and it’ll hardware pause a job in progress. The PWM is unknown. It should modulate the power doing power-width modulation power control, but it’s hooked directly into the CPU. This means it’s controlled somehow with the bytecode that gets sent to the processor, but we don’t know what triggers it. …

[Migudama (Miguel Damaceno)]

I wonder if it’s worth changing the M2 for the M3 board? Or will I not notice the difference between them?

[vukasin (Vukasin Nikolic)]

I have a M3, there is no benefit yet. @Tatarize is trying to figure out a way to use the power control of the M3 in the topic I referenced above, but resources are limited, so I would at least wait until there is some progress there.

[Tatarize (David Olsen)]

The bracket in the upper left next to the USB is a hardware pause. You could totally rig that to have a button and push said button and pause the engraving on the fly. So you’d notice that difference. There’s reportedly some PWM power modulation but that’s been a tougher cookie to crack.

However, there is another model called M3 Plus which also exists which replaces the regular steppers which are A4988s with TMC steppers these generally are better in a lot of ways, much quieter and have some really nice features. I ordered an M3 Plus that was reasonably priced from China but it never actually arrived. I think reportedly cloud ray has some of them. But, the if you’re buying a new or replacement board (which isn’t terrible to have on hand) the M3 Plus might be the way to go. Paiin (another Meerk40t dev) previously hacked one of his boards to take a TMC steppers and generally really liked his frankenboard.