Duet 0.8.5 review and guide

This write up will be split into 2 parts: my personal experience with the board and an overview of the Duet 0.8.5 and some of its perks and features as well as a setup guide. I will do my best to keep things simple and to the point while still providing a reasonable amount of helpful commentary. If any part of this tutorial does not go into enough detail, please reference the links sprinkled throughout the the guide.

Personal Experience

Diving into my personal experience, I was hired by a client to install a Duet 0.8.5 on his 3D printer. Initially I struggled to understand how to set it up, but after reading over the resources provided on the product page for the board on Filastruder.com I was able to get a handle on what to do.
    I played around with trying to flash the firmware from OSX, but I switched over to Windows as it was more straightforward. After that I moved on to wiring up the board and it was pretty much the same experience that I have had with other boards. Most of the connections were pins and it had screw terminals in all the right places.
    A few features that I really appreciate are the multiple spots for fans that are constantly on for the hot end, and spots for gcode controlled fans for cooling. Most controllers do not have that extra “always on” fan connector, so it was nice to have that. It showed that the people who made the Duet really thought about the needs of the user when they designed the board. Another feature that was actually a bigger deal than I thought was quiet stepper drivers. The stepper drives on the Duet were far less whiny than the ones on the Ramps 1.4 we had installed previously.
    The two biggest reasons my client wanted the duet was for the online print server and the 32 bit capabilities of the board. The web server was easy to set up, and it makes printing from any computer on the same network as the printer a breeze. My client had both a desktop and a laptop and we could access the print server from each one, which made things intuitive.
The Duet has a slightly different workflow than the Ramps that we were using previously. Instead of printing over usb, we use Cura to generate a gcode file for our model and then we upload the gcode file to the print server on the Duet. After it is uploaded and you press print you can navigate away from the web server page because when you upload the gcode file it is stored on the local storage of the Duet. You can also go back to the webpage at any time during the printing process. In addition, the print server has a lot of very useful features like: real time temperature graphs, active print time estimation, layer time stats, and a control panel for jogging the axes just like Pronterface.
Another neat feature is the LED lights dedicated to the endstops. They turn off when the endstop is triggered. This makes checking if the endstops are working very easy.
Overall the Duet is a much more mature product for controlling your 3D printer than other 32 bit boards like the azteeg x5 mini. Other solutions like the Ramps work, but they lack critical features like support for always on fans, quiet stepper drivers, and a web interface. I would recommend the Duet to people who have some experience with 3D printing and are looking for a well thought out solution to controlling your 3D printer.

Setup Guide

The Duet is different from most other 3D printer boards because it features a 32 bit architecture, ethernet connectivity, 5 integrated stepper drivers, pins for an expansion board allowing you to add even more steppers for extra extruders, and support for a touch screen interface. When compared to the Ramps, this board is a much more mature and professional 3D printing control solution.
I have prior experience configuring ramps style boards and the smoothie based 32 bit Azteeg X5 mini. While there is some limited overlap, setting up the Duet was different. In addition, the Duet is not nearly as mainstream as the Ramps board and thus there is not as many tutorials. This tutorial will cover the configuration of the Duet for a Cartesian based printer.

The Duet comes pre installed with firmware. You can skip updating the firmware and configure “config.g” (covered later in the tutorial) or you can reflash the board with the latest version of the firmware. If you want to reflash the board with the latest firmware you will need to download some files and run a program. I believe this can be done on OSX as well as windows, but I had issues with flashing from OSX, so I just booted into Windows on my MacBook to take care of this. You will need to download the firmware from here: https://github.com/dc42/RepRapFirmware/tree/dev

The next step is erasing the current contents of the Duet by holding the erase button on the Duet while it is powered on by USB only. The erase button is the farthest left button from the USB port. The other switch is the reset button, ignore it.

Now that your Duet is erased it is time to open up command prompt and upload the new firmware. In the files that you downloaded earlier there is a program called “bossac.exe”. Get both the new firmware that you want to upload and bossac.exe in the same folder and navigate over to that folder in command prompt.

Then execute the following command in command prompt while the Duet is still plugged in over USB:

bossac.exe -e -w -v -b RepRap Firmware-YOURVERSIONHERE.bin

If everything goes well your firmware should be uploaded. If you get an error message this webpage has some resources on troubleshooting: https://duet3d.com/wiki/Duet_Wiki

There is a micro SD card on the Duet that now has the new firmware uploaded. Take that out and put it in your computer and navigate over to it. In the SD card you will find 4 folders, we only care about “g codes” and “sys”.

In each folder there will be a variety of options that match your printer. Find the version that matches your printer the closest and change its name from gcodes-XXX and sys-XXX to g codes and sys.

Example: gcodes-Ormerod -----> gcodes
         sys-Ormerod ----------> sys

You will also need to take care of wiring up your system. A wiring diagram can be found here:
http://reprap.org/wiki/Duet_Wiring

You are almost finished now! The last steps are configuring the specifics for your printer like thermistor type and homing procedures. You can edit these things by opening up the gcode files in “sys” as text documents, editing them, and saving them. No recompiling is needed.

You will most likely need to do the following:
Configure your endstops in: config.g
Configure your steps per mm in: config.g
Configure your thermistor type in: config.g
Configure your network settings in: config.g
Configure your homing procedures in: homeall.g, homez.g, homey.g, and homez.g
Configure your printer name in: config.g

Note- all of the above are in the “sys” folder on the sd card.

This website will help you configure the Duet to a Cartesian printer: http://reprap.org/wiki/Configuring_RepR … an_printer

For the networking I plugged my printer into my router with a spare ethernet cable and configured it from there. If you are connecting your printer to your router like I did, you will first need to open up command prompt on your computer and type in and run ipconfig.

From that your computer will spit out some info that looks like this:

Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : lan
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::45dc:fdd3:67 dd:db 47%11
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.66
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.254

Now go to your config.g file on your SD card and copy over the Default gateway and subnet mask to the M553 and M554 spots. Then take your IP address from ipconfig, add 10 to the last numbers and enter that in for the M552 spot. This will be the ip address you type into your browser to connect with duet over the network.

Example of correct configuration in config.g:
M552 P192.168.1.76
M553 P255.255.255.0
M554 P192.168.1.254

If you have any issues with the networking reference this guide:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-EZ … EwJnX8/pub

If you have any issues with this guide, this guide goes into deeper detail on things that I skipped to just make this tutorial less complicated and more straightforward:

https://duet3d.com/wiki/Duet_Wiki

Feel free to PM if you need help, have questions, or have a suggestion to change part of this guide.