I have been toying with the idea for a few weeks now about unifying some of the communications with 3D printers. And thereby future proofing the 3D printer market.
One of these ideas, is looking at potential communication protocols/buses.
It came to conclusion that the use of a CAN bus could help streamline some of the control and sensing. Getting diagnostics, where available is also nice.
While things like the Trinamic 2130 can be interfaced to with a CAN to SPI bridge.
With CAN, external peripherals, like the common Remote Display (eg RepRapDiscount Full Graphic Display) could be easily extendable.
Though in the case of existing Remote Display's an interface controller would be needed, however, with bringing the code out of the main trunk, to enable Remote Displays to operate on a CAN, would alleviate the main processor of that extra processing overhead, and use those resources for printing, then just update the user as often as required.
The other thing too here is, what to do with the external SD card slots that are on these displays?
I have never been a fan of such long, and unshielded ribbon cables, which run via SPI on them. In future proofing, I would expect new Remote Displays to be engineered with USB (Type C connectors? Please?) thumb drive support, as these have shielding already, and are already designed for hot swap, whereas SD cards are not.
Question then is, would it be possible to have Marlin 2.x to incorporate CAN as a protocol/bus?
Disclaimer:
This is just a proposed idea.
I am not a coder at heart, and only do rudimentary dabbling from time to time.
I have been toying with the idea for a few weeks now about unifying some of the communications with 3D printers. And thereby future proofing the 3D printer market.
One of these ideas, is looking at potential communication protocols/buses.
It came to conclusion that the use of a CAN bus could help streamline some of the control and sensing. Getting diagnostics, where available is also nice.
While things like the Trinamic 2130 can be interfaced to with a CAN to SPI bridge.
With CAN, external peripherals, like the common Remote Display (eg RepRapDiscount Full Graphic Display) could be easily extendable.
Though in the case of existing Remote Display's an interface controller would be needed, however, with bringing the code out of the main trunk, to enable Remote Displays to operate on a CAN, would alleviate the main processor of that extra processing overhead, and use those resources for printing, then just update the user as often as required.
The other thing too here is, what to do with the external SD card slots that are on these displays?
I have never been a fan of such long, and unshielded ribbon cables, which run via SPI on them. In future proofing, I would expect new Remote Displays to be engineered with USB (Type C connectors? Please?) thumb drive support, as these have shielding already, and are already designed for hot swap, whereas SD cards are not.
Question then is, would it be possible to have Marlin 2.x to incorporate CAN as a protocol/bus?
Disclaimer:
This is just a proposed idea.
I am not a coder at heart, and only do rudimentary dabbling from time to time.