[Arm-netbook] riki200 v3 first print: success

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 6:22 AM, Christopher Havel
<laserhawk64 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey, Luke, this might be useful to you... (I *think* I have the right
> thread here... lol...)
>
> https://hackaday.com/2017/09/17/better-stepping-with-8-bit-micros/

 they're using DMA - which is really what you're supposed to be doing anyway.

 the entire arduino software ecosystem was never designed to actually
give people proper access to the hardware.  anything that's a 180mb
download and requires a 200mb runtime environment to compile and
upload an executable that's only 16k in size *really* isn't going to
end well.

 so they're stepping well outside of the "normal" boundaries - good
luck to them.

 personally i feel it's much better to use a faster 32-bit processor,
and to stick reaaasonably within an eco-system.  however....
RepRapFirmware is just... genuinely much better-designed than Marlin.
it's written in c++, it takes full advantage of OO techniques (Marlin
does not.  at all).  it's also event-driven which means that the
highest priority - based on a timer - is the actual stepper moving,
with other "tasks" running to handle keeping the queue full... lots
more as well.

 also as it's timer-based and event-driven it's *automatically* far
superior to what Marlin does.  if you wanted to use DMA (if it isn't
already) it would be far easier to use that in RepRapFirmware than
Marlin.  Marlin is a hard-coded for-loop with an interrupt for
handling moves, but it's bit-banged (!) and... yeah.

anyway.  back to PCB work...


l.