There are a few options already out there for ARM based RepRap controllers. Designing the board is only part of the work. Testing, firmware, feature-completeness. That's where the difficulty lays.
I currently have an ARM prototype laying on my desk at Ultimaker. Developed by Erik vd Zalm. Pretty cool board, lots of cool features. But the firmware is a bit far from finished, and we are looking on how to go forward with this. That's all I can share right now.
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jonnybischof 60
I think this sounds interesting, though it's probably rather overkill than necessity (the UM1 runs pretty well, even at high speeds...)
Do you have an estimate in BOM cost? How complex is your main PCB? 4 layers, 6 layers?
The one huge advantage of an Arduino mainboard is, that it costs some ridiculous 35$ (or something). I've been playing with the thought of making a custom electronics for myself, expecially regarding shortcomins on power supply design, ESD protection, dedicated watchdog IC and expandability.
Imho it makes sense only if the new electronics are a complete replacement for the UM original electronics including the Ulticontroller. These cost 275 Euros combined, which is a price range that could be matched IF you don't charge anything for the development costs AND you produce them in small series quantity (like 100 or 200 pcs).
But the most important thing would be that it should be completely open source, just like the original. I'd love to see such a project come to life and would like to participate, and I'd definetly buy some.
I must admit though that I'm not very experienced on the firmware side of things - I don't think it's trivial to recreate Marlin for a 32bit ARM CPU. It's probably written in C (is it?) so there should be some level of portability, but that's just not (yet) my strong side...
I know that the Marlin firmware is constantly being improved and debugged, which means that "you" (meaning the guy who makes the firmware in the end) will also have to track that progress and, if necessary, adapt the ARM firmware as well.
This could become a very time consuming process - time I would probably not have.
/edit:
I'm planning on buying a second UM1 kit for my prototyping lab soon, throwing in "a few" upgrades. Improved electronics are definetly on my wishlist...
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