So I have a total of 7 TAZ printers that have had more than their fair share of Rambo failures. More than I would expect I should be seeing. Over the past 10 or so years, I’ve replaced 6 rambo’s so far. This feels excessive. Always motor driver failures.
The machines are all kept tip top, fans all work, and surge suppression is present at the UPS level as well as at the house circuit level. Everything is well maintained.
It feels to me like Rambo boards are poorly designed. That coupled with the fact that I cannot replace a motor driver on the board is really irritating (poor design if you ask me).
So, I’ve been thinking… is there a better “replacement” board that I could swap in to replace these continually failing rambo’s? Just getting tired of paying for something that doesn’t seem to last more than a couple years.
Hopefully there’s something out there that’s more robust that would work with my printers (TAZ5’s and TAZ6’s).
Just as a note, these driver failures seem to be happening now, on printers that have been in use for 5-6 years. That ain’t bad. The chips are attached to the board the way they are in order to help with heat dissipation, and for the most part, it does.
But that said, I do prefer easily-replaced drivers.
The SKR Turbos are popular replacements. I went with a BTT Octopus 1.1 board to have future-proofing. The design of either will require making extensions to the stepper wiring and a few others. By going with 2209 drivers, you can do sensorless homing and avoid extending endstop wires.
Thanks very much for your reply. Was wondering if you’re aware of anyone that’s modified the firmware for the SKR Turbo for the standard single extruder print head (2.85 filament)? Or for that matter, any of the other boards that you mention? I haven’t found any as of yet from my searching.
Thank-you! I’ll have a look. I’m looking for something that would work with SKR Turbo, as it appears to be a rather inexpensive board. I’m looking at having to change quite a number of boards in the coming months, and keeping the costs down is a good part of my focus.
There’s not a lot of premade firmwares for the SKR since if you’re doing it that custom, it probably won’t be a match for others.
Like my btt octopus 1.1 firmware is built for bltouch, btt’s smart filament sensor, and has a tool change menu built around my custom titan extruder 1.75mm, biqu h2 extruder 1.75mm, standard single extruder 2.85mm, and itworks3d aero pro extruder. They have my PID tuning, linear advance, and extruder power alterations that wouldn’t be a lot of use for others.
If you are managing several and want to upgrade them, it’s extremely worthwhile to learn the basics of editing a marlin config to make it suit your needs.
Thanks a bunch for the information. I think I’m going to give it a shot. Been reading up on modifying Marlin, and it doesn’t look like it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. No doubt I’ll blunder here and there, but looks to me like a worthwhile endeavor!
I have a candidate right now sitting collecting dust with a dead rambo. We’ll see how I get on with it.
If it goes well, then I’ll swap out the rambos on the other printers as they drop off.
This video here is the most comprehensive and informative thing that helped me in my journey to a full custom Taz, as it covers the installation of the software and how to do basic tests:
A bit of a dead end, however, was this fork: GitHub - jimbalny/Marlin-Taz-5-SKR-1.4-Turbo: Marlin 2.0.x For Taz 5 SKR 1.4 Turbo . It was supposed to be BL touch and sensorless, but was missing enough key things that I had much better results from starting fresh and just referencing the LulzBot master source when modifying the most recent bugfix version of Marlin.
