Hi all,
I haven’t mentioned much lately with all that’s been going on elsewhere in the space.
With approval in the budget to buy replacement control boards and LCD interfaces for the CR-X printers, I’d held off to see what happened in the Black Friday sales.
Turns out, it was a good thing 
For some reason they’re not making the control boards I’d originally asked for in the budget allocation. That, combined with the sales, means I was able to get both LCDs and the control boards, for nearly 75% of the original budget. Yay sales! These will be the BigTreeTech Octopus 1.1 boards with TMC2209 drivers.
What does this mean really? For the CR-X printers, not a huge amount really, however, it does give us options in the future if we ever wanted to add more extruders or other fancy ideas, such as chamber cooling fans on an enclosure or even CANBus devices. Yeah, @devians is probably sick of hearing me talk about CANBus closed loop steppers
180MHz 32-bit CPU (up from the 16-bit 8MHz on the current machine) 8 motor drivers, 4 hotend high current PWM interfaces that can be used for things like hotends or big fans, can mix 3.3v, 5v, 12v and 24v devices on the same board, 8 fans, 8 endstop plugs, and both i2c and CAN interfaces. Overkill for these machines, but at the same time they were cheaper than the originally proposed board while being better with more safety elements.
And they have a full neopixel interface too. ALL THE RGBS!
Yeah, I think they’re pretty cool, as do many of the high end printer communities.
They’ll arrive in my hot hands sometime next week, and I’ll set about upgrading the Right CR-X the week of the 20th. Once that’s all bedded in, and we’re good on the work flow with documentation and all the WAD magic, we’ll repeat it all with the Left CR-X.