Supercharge your 3D printer with the Fastbot BBP controller board

There’s no denying that as much as we love our 3D printers, there are many factors involved with the 3D printing process that leave much to be desired. Among them is of course the time it takes once you hit the “Print” button to having a finished 3D print in your hand

Aiming to speed up the 3D printing process, a group of young (but experienced!) tech-savvy 3D printing enthusiasts who make up the Fastbot team have been busy creating a 3D printer controller board that they have recently launched on Kickstarter. The team’s BBP 3D printer controller board is designed to be a complete and reliable solution to many current problems with 3D printers, with speed being among them.

The board, which starts at just $79 for early backers, features everything one would seemingly need to upgrade their 3D printer to make it faster and easier to use. Additionally, the board can also be used in other desktop fabrication machines including laser cutters and CNC mills.

The board, which is powered by an AM335x, 1GHZ Cortex-A8 processor and includes 5 or 6 stepper motor drivers, 3 heaters, 6 endstops, 6 fans, 1 microSD Card socket, 1 Ethernet socket and 1 USB socket for USB WiFi or camera connectivity, runs at a higher frequency than traditional control boards (such as RAMPS and Smoothie) whose frequencies are too low to let a motor run faster. With the help of the on-board 3D-bit ARM along with Programmable Realtime Units inside the chip, the BBP is capable of making a 3D printer print at least 4 times faster than before.

“We have developed a new 3d printer firmware to fully use the BBP,” says the Fastbot team on their Kickstarter page. “With the help of this firmware, it is easy to generate high frequency step control signal, and that is why BBP can make 3d printing faster than ever and also the most amazing point.”