The Reach board was ready for review over two years ago, but only now the software for it was ready. Some people have made their own versions of the board, but as far as I know, no one has ever gotten it to work! Well, that all ended on Tuesday, when the Reach board was running for full capacity.

Reach A0 is an add-on board for Replicape A4A, the pre-runner for the Rev B board. Many people have asked for a Reach rev B, one that is compatible with Replicape Rev B. All I can say is that it will be designed, but the volume will likely not make it a viable product for sale. Best case will be small production run, but as you know that really increases the price.

The cool thing about this is that Redeem now has support for up to 8 axes that can be operated at the same time. Previously, one had to chose an extruder, but now you can be fancy and use this G-code:

G0 X10 Y10 Z10 E10 H10 A10 B10 C10

That is if you are one of the three-ish people that have a Reach board. The fans can be connected to the thermistors, so the fan on the extruder starts when the extruder temperature goes above 60 degrees celsius. The M104 command now also supports higher number extruders as well.

Any of the additional axes can also be used in “slave mode” so there is no need for a splitting cable if you happen to have an additional stepper driver.

Fun project! Hopefully someone will try this out with a diamond hot-end or Kraken.

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I have gotten a few requests for an expansion board to accompany the Replicape lately, so I have made an inital version for anyone interested in adding more extruders than the standard two present on Replicape.

The Reach board uses the spare PWM and ADC pins from Replicape to keep the cost down and the software changes to a minimum. Reach adds three more high power mosfets controlled by PWM, three low power mosfets controlled by PWM for extra fans (12V) , three more thermistor inputs, and three stepper motors all individually programmable down to 1/32 step and with programmable drive current, just like on the motherboard.

This should make the board suitable for the new generation of hot ends such as Kraken or even color-blending extruders. CMYK color prints with support material anyone? : )

The trade-off is that there are no longer any available pins for backlight, resistive touch  or buttons for an LCD3 cape to stack on top. For this reason, the 46-pin headers are not stacking. If you want to use a display, you need to use the HDMI and USB host ports on the BeagleBone Black, for instance by adding a Manga Screen  (Kickstarter coming soon).

The first “batch” will only be some 5 boards for prototyping and testing the design. As always, anyone is free to make their own version, but unless you are in a big hurry to try it, I suggest you wait for my own review before trying it. The Rev A0-boards have a tendency to need updating..  : )

I’ll leave the design simmering a few days before sending it in. If anyone has any comments, feel free to add them and I’ll try to defend my design choices or make changes if I do not have an answer.

The design-files and gerbers are here: https://bitbucket.org/intelligentagent/replicape

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