BTT Octopus - This Controller Has (almost) EVERYTHING

3d printer designs are starting to get more complex every day you're seeing multiple independent zed motors tool changers and multi-extruder setups are becoming more and more common to help support the features that these new designs require you're starting to see more robust controller boards out on the market one of those is the big tree tech octopus board this board supports up to eight stepper drivers and a plethora of other features so let's take a look at it [Music] so the first thing i want to acknowledge is that this board was sent to me by big tree tech for review and evaluation the words and opinions in this review are my own i haven't been paid to say anything they simply just provided me the board now this is a recent thing with controller boards and i'm really starting to like this first notice this with the spider board is that packaging for these controller boards is getting better we're no longer seeing the generic brown cardboard box that's half crushed we're actually seeing proper packaging for these boards there really isn't much to the box itself this is the 1.1 revision of the octopus but not mistaken it corrected some silk screening issues on the original v 1.0 version okay let's open up the box we have our big treetac business card a usb c cable our big treetech rubber ducky and the controller board itself now this unit did not come with stepper drivers i will be using tmc2209 drivers but this board does support the common step stick drivers that most of us use let's open up the package and take a look at the board and there are some jumpers pre-installed as well we're gonna have to switch some of these around to configure this to suit our needs so looking at the board it is very well built it does feel very solid the soldering is very good there's a little bit of residue from cleaning the solder off during the flow but all in all the board does feel very well built this is actually the second board i have i already have one pre-installed and i did go through that one thoroughly i couldn't find anything wrong with the board so we'll start on the left of the board and we'll work our way around in a clockwise direction just taking a look at everything now starting off we do have our 24 volt in and bed out and this board is arranged a little bit differently than most you'll see that it actually has motor power board power and bed power separate so what this means is you need to feed three separate vin in to power this board and then we also have our bed out here now having board power and bed power separate is common on a lot of boards however having stepper motor power separate does have its advantages what that means is you can run your stepper motors at a higher voltage than your controller board for increased performance steppers perform better at higher voltages now unfortunately though this board only includes 35 volt caps so that means if you do want to run your stepper drivers at a higher voltage you are limited by that 35 volt cap stepper drivers like the 5160s can handle those higher voltages and you do get much more performance out of them with the higher voltage so while having a separate motor in voltage is a nice feature because of these 35 volt caps you really only need to be limited to i believe it's 32 volt is the common power supply in that size range as you'll be able to use max now next we have our eight stepper driver slots now as you can see here they are labeled a little bit differently on most controller boards you'll see your xyz and then all the extra ones are labeled extruder that nomenclature is pretty common however i'm happy to see board manufacturers starting to move away from that simply for the fact that printers now don't really conform to that standard um it's nice to just be numbered because when you're going through your configuration setup it's all just pins anyways like what it says for stepper zed on your board isn't stepper zed it's pin pb7 or whatever so it is nice to see that these are labeled motor zero two seven now motor two is split so if you are running a setup with two zed motors that are tied together you can use this this is common for traditional zed setups on such as a prusa mark iii for example however you have eight motors here most modern firmware support some form of gantry tramming you're going to want to run your zed motors independently so this will be installed in my voron 2.4 the tallboy so in my case i will have a b motors an extruder motor and then four zed motors you do have jumpers as well for configuring uart or sbi depending on the stepper driver you are installing over on this end we do have a connection for a tft display bl touch hookup we have our usb c connector and i believe this is only running at usb 2.0 speeds it just is a usb-c connector itself i really like these usbc connectors because they are reversible and more robust than the micro usbs behind that we have two ic connections and then also we have a uart connection back here with these pins we have our flash card port we have two expansion ports this is for your traditional reprap graphical display we have a can connector here now i do run clipper at this time cam bus connectors are not supported on the board itself they have to go through the raspberry pi through a usb connection first however in the future if can bus would be supported by clipper this board does have a built-in can bus also this board does support marlin and i believe there will be a future revision of this board that will support reprap firmware so this port right now isn't quite useful but in the future depending on software updates may be more practical we have our thermistors here and we have multiple thermistor inputs because we have multiple heaters we have four heaters for this board plus the bed so we have one thermistor for the bed and then four for the hot end does have a full size usb here i believe this is for marlin if you wanted to plug in a usb stick for additional storage we have our end stops and this has eight end stops it has two each for xyz and then two filament end stops so you have eight configurable end stops down here too we do have a sensor pin now this sensor pin is for inductive probes and based on the settings of this one jumper here it can be fed either 5 12 or 24 volt and it is protected so for the common 24 volt bed probes that the vorons use you can plug it directly in here not using the bat 85 diode because the board is protected however i do want to make a note with these omron style probes that are commonly used with war ons off aliexpress because there's a voltage drop with these or something else with the voltage this sensor pin does not work unfortunately it does not detect when the probe is activated so if you're using these style of probes and it is not working with this you will have to use the bat 85 diode and plug the sense pin into one of the free end stops instead of plugging all three wires into the sensor port this isn't really called out great in the documentation it's kind of hard to figure out what exactly is going on there some users report it works okay i myself i try two different probes multiple different setups in configuration i could not get the probe to work with the dedicated sensor pin so if you are running into issues with an inductive probe you may have to hook it up more traditional methods through a end stop next to our end stops we have our fans and this thing has a lot of fans you have six controllable fans that have voltage selectors for either 5 12 or 24 volts so you can run up to six controllable fans with controllable voltages and then two always on fans and again controllable voltages either 512 or 24. this little three pin connector here is for our rgb led control up here we have our raspberry pi connector if we do want to power a raspberry pi off of this board and then also we have a power detector port for power loss recovery with an add-on board and also a power on for remotely controlling power to the printer with certain firmwares as you can see we do have replaceable fuses as well for our voltage in and that is it for the main features of the board itself so let's go ahead and get this installed in the printer hooked up and get it running now the installation of this board was rather straightforward and very simple if you've ever installed an skr type board before it's pretty much the same process only the board's a little bit bigger now to make the installation even easier i used a pre-made wire loom provided to me from lineo these pre-made wire looms definitely make the installation and wiring of your voron build much much more simpler you're no longer having to estimate wire lengths and crimp on all the terminals it all comes pre-configured for the board of choice and the build size you are building now i did have to do a few changes such as adding some dupont connectors for my hall effect end stop and because my build is an oddball size i had a little bit of extra wire once i was finished but there's plenty of room under the hood and zip ties are very good at managing extra wires so i do want to give a shout out for leno for providing this high quality pre-made wire loom for this build it definitely sped up the installation now when it comes to firmware you guys know i like clipper so installing clipper on here was pretty much the same as most skr boards again you're going to install the firmware via an sd card you're going to flash the board now because this is a newer board and there really is no default configuration for the v 2.4 and my printer is a little bit of oddball size i had to go through and make my own to do that it was quite simple i started with the default config for a v 2.4 in my case i used the one from v226 here which is running a visex spider all i did was adjust the pin mapping to match the pin mapping of the big treetech octopus and then i just referenced all my build size and stop positions z offset from the original configuration from when this thing was running a taco raven put it all together save restart it's good to print i don't need to do any additional tuning because it's running clipper and for those that have run clipper on multiple machines you know that the controller board itself doesn't have a massive impact on the printer so as long as your settings are the same you can swap out a controller board save your settings and you can just continue printing i haven't had to recalibrate anything on this printer my z offset is still good my pressure advance values are still good nothing's really changed so that's why i'm not going to bring out any prints right now to show comparisons of before and after with clipper a 32-bit controller board running modern tmc drivers all are mostly the same when it comes to choosing controller board for your printer you're pretty much going to look at which controller board has the features you want the support you want the price you want and the build quality you want so this is freshly installed in my machine right now i'm going to be printing with it over the next coming couple of weeks and then at that point i will do a comparison video between the big treetech octopus and the fizzex spider that i have installed in my v226 my smaller v 2.4 and we'll be able to do a comparison at that time if there is any long-term differences between these two boards because again with clipper your controller board doesn't matter as much as some other firmwares so overall i am impressed with the board the build quality is very good it is a larger board than the physx spyder but it does support a couple more extra features such as more fans and the additional motor in voltage so it really comes down to what you're looking for in your build what kind of features you need and the price point you're willing to spend along with other features such as manufacturing quality and availability hope you enjoyed this introduction to the big treetech octopus board as always if you have any questions make sure you ask them in the comments below if you want to help support the channel the content i create and the things i do i do have a link in the description as well along with an affiliate link for the big tree tech octopus purchasing it through the affiliate link will help support additional content i hope you learned something new today and as always have yourself a great day [Music] cheers you

Channel: NERO 3D

Views: 80,428

Keywords: voron, voron design, v2, v2.4, v2.1, v24, v2.2, v2.0, vzero, v0, v1, serial, request, cereal, overview, intro, 3d, printer, 3d printer, corexy, core, xy, abs, enclosed, btt, bigtreetech, biqu, octopus, BTT octopus, spider, spyder, controller, 8 stepper, canbus, klipper, printing, 3d printing, review, biqu octopus

Id: qOvxQm2UIMg

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021