Re-use your 3D printer mainboard and LCD for awesome Arduino projects

If you have an old 8 bit 3D printer mainboards sitting around doing nothing, this guide is for you. They are essential Arduino boards, with the added bonus of being able to stepper motors, high current devices through MOSFETs, with support for interactive LCD displays.

In this video, we go through how to setup and use your mainboard for a range of uses. Free sketches are below to help get you started. The beauty comes when you combine the functions here to achieve something powerful. I have such a project coming up on the channel that will be useful for many people.

I have focused on the Crality Melzi here because many people will have them lying around. Things get even easier with a 2560 based Ramps compatible board.All of the sketches will still work by substituting in the correct pin definitions. In theory, this idea will also work for 32 bit boards but using the PlatformIO development environment.

My free starter sketches for Creality Melzi: https://gum.co/RnlYq

Timestamps courtesy of id:
1:15 Foundation
2:48 Setup
5:24 Bootloader
5:46 Digital Outputs & Serial
7:36 Button inputs
9:10 PWM outputs
10:41 Stepper motors
12:23 Servo
13:25 eeprom
14:20 LCD and encoder

Resources:
Sanguino hardware support: https://github.com/Lauszus/Sanguino/
ATmega 1284P datasheet: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/ATmega164A_PA-324A_PA-644A_PA-1284_P_Data-Sheet-40002070B.pdf
Creality Melzi pins: https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin/blob/2.0.x/Marlin/src/pins/sanguino/pins_MELZI_CREALITY.h

TH3D external MOSFET: https://bit.ly/2Hi2Oop

Libaries I used (all can be installed from the Arduino library manager):
Speedy stepper: https://github.com/Stan-Reifel/SpeedyStepper/
U8Glib: https://github.com/olikraus/u8glib/
EncoderStepCounter: https://github.com/M-Reimer/EncoderStepCounter/
Bounce2: https://github.com/thomasfredericks/Bounce2
Servo: https://github.com/arduino-libraries/Servo

Buy quality and affordable filament from X3D. Buy 3, get 1 free and a free sample pack with every order: www.x3d.com.au

Buy quality resins from 3D Printers Online. Get modelling, ABS-like, flex, high temp and tough resin at www.3dprintersonline.com.au

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