Prunt Board 3 is a 3D printer control board designed for enthusiasts seeking to achieve performance levels from their printer that are unattainable with existing motion controllers. This is the first widely available piece of hardware that runs Prunt, our completely new motion control system. Both our hardware and software contain features that you won’t find in existing solutions, helping to make your 3D printer faster and safer while creating higher-quality prints.

Competing motion controllers, such as Klipper and Marlin, only output 3-phase trapezoidal motion profiles, which fail to accurately model the types of motion possible in reality, leading to vibrations that manifest as ringing artifacts in the finished print. Prunt relies on 31-phase motion profiles, which are much closer to real-world physics, resulting in fewer ringing artifacts in prints and less component wear from vibrations. Additionally, Prunt Board 3 utilizes hardware acceleration to execute all planned motions with a level of precision that is simply impossible with software-based solutions.

Upgrade Your 3D Printer

Besides producing better prints, Prunt Board 3 is also the most robust 3D printing control board on the market. You can short-circuit a heater, and our board will detect the short and shut off the heater power within 2 microseconds. You can short a thermistor to a heater, and not only will no damage occur, but our board will detect and report it. You can short the wires of a fan, and once again, our board will detect and report it. If you somehow manage to damage the board (perhaps by shorting mains voltage to it from a loose wire, which we recommend you avoid), the USB port is electrically isolated, so your PC or Raspberry Pi won’t be damaged. These are just some of the many protections available on our hardware to make your printer safer and more reliable.

In addition to these core features, we have also implemented various smaller quality-of-life enhancements, such as completely automated firmware updates and the replacement of cumbersome configuration files with a simple graphical user interface. Finally, if you find that our software does not fit your use case, then our hardware is capable of running Klipper without having to reflash the firmware and with some additional safety features that prevent an erroneous configuration from damaging the board.

Features & Specifications

Hardware

• 6× TMC2240 stepper drivers, all capable of running at 3 A with minimal airflow
• 2× 15 A heater outputs with true short circuit protection that protects the board
• 4× fan outputs, supporting 2, 3, and 4-pin fans, all up to 2 A with short circuit protection
• 4× thermistor inputs supporting PT1000 and most common NTC thermistors with protection against shorts to other wires, including heaters
• 4× endstop inputs with protection against shorts to other wires
• Fully isolated USB to protect upstream devices
• Hardware-powered step generation for precise timings and step rates
• Hardware counters for high-speed fan tachometers
• Robust ESD protection
• Buffered thermistor inputs to reduce noise and increase maximum ADC sample rate

Software

• Fail-safe firmware updates eliminate the need to install a jumper
• Corner blending with user-defined deviation, with a higher order of continuity than arcs produced by slicers
• Constrained and independently adjustable velocity, acceleration, jerk, snap, and crackle for smoother printing
• Pinout data provided by the board to eliminate the need to edit pin mappings in a configuration file
• Built-in GUI for configuration editing without the need to ever edit configuration files directly
• Safer and faster homing by defining the maximum overshoot distance instead of speed

Open Source

The Prunt firmware library and the firmware implementation for this board are open source under version 3 of the GPL license. The schematic for Prunt Board 3 is publicly available and hardware designs will be made public on our GitHub page before it ships to backers.

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