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Extruder slave drive (no replies)

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I live in Illinois, but your group seems to be the only one active in a long time sorry for interloping...


I’ve just upgraded my Anet A6 to Ramps 1.4, (way overdue) But couldn’t get Marlin 2.0 to compile so I loaded 1.1.9 using PlatformIO, which for the 2560 processor is fine.

Years ago I built a “dry box” for my (PETG) filament which sits on the floor and feeds the direct drive extruder through a guide mounted a the top of the machine. This arrangement induces a vertical force on the X-axis which sometimes effects the layer consistency and quality depending on how full the filament roll is.

I came up with the idea to add a “slave” to E0 to pull the filament from the dry box and “loop” over the printer and down to the direct drive without touching anything. Essentially using a “Boden Drive” in sync with the E0 direct drive. And this is where it falls apart.

I tried assigning the same pin numbers to E1 from E0 in “pins_RAMP.h” – connected the second stepper to E1 and it never showed any sign of life. If I tell it I have two extruders it wants heater and thermistor I/O for E1.

I tried making a “Y” splitter cable to connect E0 to both steppers motors – both stopped working and only “twitched” one step back and forth. Hey, it works for the “Z” axis…

I’ve search, without luck, for a way to use AUX1 to output the STEP and DIR pin info from E0 to drive an external stepper driver. I was really hoping to use the E1 “spare” driver for this, but it’s not looking good.

It’s obvious “I” lack the Marlin/RAMPS knowledge to solve this “probably simple” question – any advice would be terrific. Thanks for reading my rant, Jeff

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