Adding a 2nd Hot End

If you look at the current beta on Robo's GITHUB you can toggle a variable before compiling that will use 2 extruders. I am not a big fan of their beta firmware and they definitely say the dual extrusion code is a work in progress. But it is the only game in town unless you want to learn way more about Marlin than anyone should. They designate an R2 modded for two extruders as R2_DUAL.

Please note that the current development version of Marlin that Robo is working with is Marlin 1.1.6 (two version behind Marlin development). They have copies of Marlin 1.1.7 and 1.1.8 on their GITHUB but I have no clue how up-to-date those are with the Robo changes.

 

You can review what I did for the C2 to add the second extruder. It should be a little more straight-forward since the R2 was at least originally designed for that.

 

I am pretty sure the R2 extruder already has all the wiring internally too for the 2nd one, so that is a plus

 

Yep it is all there, I really think the issue is firmware and making it plug and play. If you download the firmware and try to compile for dual extruders you will get compilation errors the last time I checked, about a week ago.

 

That stinks. I had to hack up the version of Marlin I used for exactly the same reasons and I was hoping that they had it sorted by now.

 

Easier to take vanilla Marlin and set it up for two extruders than it is to take Robo's. @mark tomlinson if you pull mine, switch it to BILINEAR auto-leveling and then set up dual extrusion it should work just fine.

Robo put a lot of work into ifdef, if...endif, etc. so they would have one base for R2, C2, R2_DUAL and it is of no value to the enduser since endusers don't compile their own firmware, nor is the rPi capable enough to compile it in any reasonable amount of time (as well as its not configured). It is still easier to take generic Marlin and just configure it with the proper bed size and proper number of extruders.

 

Spot on.

At the time we did that there was at least one generic Marlin bug around dual extruders that we had to hack about in so if that is sorted now I can just use generic Marlin for the whole thing.

 

I would go with 1.1.8. As it stands now, there are over 400 more commits beyond 1.1.8 in bugfix-1.1.x but the bulk appear to be for obscure stuff, LCD menus, example configs and things needed to keep Marlin version 2.x apace.

 

OK, I will give that a whirl now that the printers are moved and (sort-of) re-set back up.
I think I still (somewhere) have the hacked apart version we did (that was still early 1.1.x) if worst comes to worst.
I imagine it will be pretty simple to make the swap since we should have a working configuration.h

 

Just yell if you need any assistance.

 

@Reigs311 if you have dual extrusion working mechanically, software or both fire up a thread and post the files and such. If you maintain the thread that is a huge help.