Hi all,
I’m running an EBB36 with USB protocol because I change out my toolhead a lot, and using USB means I don’t need to change the config each time, I can just set the DFU id of all my toolheads to the same name.
The downside of this is that I need to run both a USB cable, and 24V cables to the toolhead. I then also need to plug and unplug both the USB and molex connector.
This isn’t such a hastle, but It does complicate the wiring a bit (2 cables, vs 1), and I suspect the USB-C connector coming of is going to be the first point of failure for my toolheads.
This brings me to my question.
Is it possible to run the USB protocol over the molex connector? I know it’s possible to run CAN over USB, but that’s quite a different animal.
The short answer is “no”, you can’t use the Molex connector on a toolhead controller without rewiring it to the USB pins of the MCU and then you may have impedance issues.
Can I ask why do you change out your toolhead a lot?
If you’re rotating through a number of them, wouldn’t it be easier to just put in all the UUIDs of the toolheads you’re working with into your printer.cfg and comment out all the ones you aren’t using?
Why do I change my toolhead a lot? Aha, nice you asked.
Instead of changing nozzles, I just change out my entire toolhead.
Why do I do this? Well, if you print a lot, your hotend will eventually break, doesn’t break often, but it’s one of the first things that will break on the toolhead. Because of this, I want a cheap hotend, which is the E3D v6.
But that sucks for changing nozzles, and I feel like nozzle changes introduce a lot of opportunities to increase wear/mess up your toolhead.
So I just swap out the entire toolhead.
This also makes it much easier to do other repairs on the hotend, by just taking the complete toolhead off.
Back on topic, If I just flash all the hotends with the same UUID, then I don’t need to worry about modifying the printer files, although yes, this would absolutely doable to automate with something like a script to pick the right UUID if a toolhead is connected.
But I don’t think this is possible to do with CAN, or if it is, I also don’t want to deal with the added hardware/software of CAN over just using USB protocol.