Duet3D is known for some of the best 3D printer control boards on the market. In fact, I recently spent 9 months extensively testing the Duet 2 Maestro only to find out today that Duet3D has discontinued this line and has now produced the Duet 3 Mini 5+!
Fear not the Duet 3 Mini 5+ is here
The Duet 2 Maestro has become unfeasible during the COVID-19 outbreak, as a lot of the components were china sourced. With international shipping restraints, the cost of manufacturing the boards became prohibitive.
What do I do?
Faced with a potential product gap, the design team turned in their homework and came up with the Duet 3 Mini 5+.
There have not been a lot of facts released about the new kid on the block as of yet, however, what I can tell you is as follows…
The Duet 3 Mini 5+ is the logical evolution of the Duet 2 Maestro. It provides 5 onboard TMC 2209 drivers in addition with the usual complement of heaters, fans, IO, LCD, etc.
Inclusion of the ability to use a Mini 12864 display isn’t new. However will it support the Neopixel backlight variants without a custom cable? This is as of yet undetermined.
Both Wifi (2.4GHz) and Ethernet variants are available with the option of using an SBC for control in the same manner as other Duet 3 mainboard. Expansion is more limited, it does not support the CAN-FD bus but has a header for a three-driver expansion board.
Big Brains
Never lacking in power, Duet boards have set the bar high. They say the Duet 3 Mini 5+ to be packing an impressive punch! With processing and memory at 120MHz ARM Cortex M4F, 1Mb flash, 256Kb RAM, hardware floating-point (single precision), DMA, 4Kb cache. That is double what we find on the older Duet 2 Maestro in every way!
Watch Duets Twitter Feed for more product release info! Enjoyed this News Article? Find my Review of the Duet 2 Maestro here.
Looking for more hardware reviews? Try Michael’s test of the Micro swiss direct-drive Here.
