I'm a senior engineering student working on my design project of converting a custom built CNC machine, from a previous design group, into a 3D Printer. This means I already have stepper motors and controls in place for the basic 3 axes of movement, and it appears it won't be too complicated to add another stepper motor into this existing system for the print head.
I'm looking for the best microcontroller to use to just control the extruder head and printing bed temperatures. So it needs to be able to read values from a couple thermresitors and control the temperature of the heating blocks on them accordingly. Most of the 3D printing specific controllers I've found include stepper controls I won't need. Generic controllers I haven't been able to figure out if they would even work for my purposes. I'm pretty new to these kind of electronics, so any help I can get would be much appreciated. Does anyone have any suggestions or good places to start for how to go about doing this?
Thanks.
I'm looking for the best microcontroller to use to just control the extruder head and printing bed temperatures. So it needs to be able to read values from a couple thermresitors and control the temperature of the heating blocks on them accordingly. Most of the 3D printing specific controllers I've found include stepper controls I won't need. Generic controllers I haven't been able to figure out if they would even work for my purposes. I'm pretty new to these kind of electronics, so any help I can get would be much appreciated. Does anyone have any suggestions or good places to start for how to go about doing this?
Thanks.