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Sorry I haven't posted here for a couple of months. A few people emailed me to see if I was OK, still alive, etc. No sinister reason for not blogging, I have just been on holiday, had a few weekends away, beer festivals, BBQ's, etc, and also visited the British F1 Grand Prix.




I have also been designing a new extruder controller for HydraRaptor with a stepper motor drive. I normally build electronics straight from brain to veroboard, no schematics or planning, I just pick up the parts and solder them in. That is very quick and efficient but does not leave any design record.

I decided I wanted a micro stepping bipolar drive and the only sensible way to do that is with an off the shelf chip. They are nearly all fine pitch surface mount these days so I needed to use a PCB. It is probably 10 years since I last designed a PCB and I have never used Kicad before so it took me quite a while to get it sorted. Now that I have sent the board away for manufacture I can catch up with the blogging.