Im relatively new to Arduino, but have done a few projects, and have played round with a picaxe 3 a bit.
What im wanting to do it build a filament extruder for a 3d printer and i know there are possibly different easier ways to do it but i would like to play with arduino so it would be a good learning exercise.
The setup will be like this:
Hopper for raw materials, with level sensor (optical or ultrasonic havent decided yet)
underneath the hopper is an auger powered by a DC motor via a gearbox the will be PWM controlled to regulate speed, this will transport the raw material from the hopper to be heated and then create the pressure to extrude the filament.
nozzle/heating block, this will contain the heating device (resistive heater) and a temperature measuring device (thermocouple or thermistor) the heater will be temperature controlled with an upper and lower limit for the material chosen, have considered using a POT to adjust the temperature range to that of different materials so you could extrude PLA, ABS or other types of mateial
a small PC fan to cool the extruded materials. this is to start running when the motor does.
an LCD screen to display, temp, motor speed, and the level and an RGB led to be used as a ready indicator/warning indicator.
So whats needed shield/breakout board wise:
2A dual H bridge motor driver to power the motor and gearbox
240V Solid state relay board to control the resistive heaters from the arduino
if i use a thermocouple i would need to use a amplifier of some type otherwise the thermistor could just be connected to the appropriate pins on the arduino
20x4 LCD display, and possibly a serial adapter for this to minimize the pins required from the arduino
RGB LED connected to the arduino
Optical/ultrasonic sensor connected to the arduino
Computer fan, probably not speed controlled, just on an off
Can a single arduino uno/mega (leaning towards a mega at this stage due to shear number of pins needed) run all this at the same time? im more thinking in terms of the code required ie having the motor running via PWM, while checking the level of the hopper, while checking the temperature of the heating block while outputting into to the LCD. there is an awful lot going on.
is this going to require the use of interrupts to run some of the functions?
If the motor is pulse width controlled, would it still continue to run at its current speed if the arduino went into an interrupt service routine? same goes for the display.
any help would be very much appreciated
ill probably have a heap more questions :)
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