Fysetc in China have been producing Duet 3 clones for quite a while now. They started off producing Duet 2 wifi and ethernet boards and paneldues, and have since progressed onto Duet 3 6HC’s, Duet 3 3HC’s, Toolboards, distribution boards and 1XD’s. They were cloning the Duet 3 Mini 5+ for a while but have since withdrawn them and started producing their own variant called the “Big Dipper”. More on that board in another post.
I recently managed to acquire both an original Duet Toolboard v1.1 and a Fysetc Toolboard v1.1.
For those of you that don’t know, the Duet 3 range of control boards have a feature called CAN-FD. It allows the sending of data over two wires between multiple devices and is used a lot within modern cars etc. It has a data rate that is roughly 5 times faster than traditional CAN. But what does that mean to you and your 3D printer? Well lets just think about a typical direct drive tool head arrangement on a 3D printer. You have 4 wires for the driver, 2 wires for the hotend, 2 for the thermistor, 2 for the hotend fan, 2 for the part cooling fan and then theres probably some sort of probe on there, so lets say another 5 wires for a BLTouch. All of a sudden you have a bundle of 17 wires going to the tool. Instead, you fit a toolboard to your tool and that suddenly reduces to 6 (4 for the CAN-FD connection and 2 for power) and you can add even more features.
On to the Fysetc toolboard. As you can see in the above image, the Fysetc toolboard has a slightly different layout compared to Duet Toolboard meaning they haven’t copied the board 100%. The power connector is also in a slightly different position.
It could be nice if Fysetc clearly identified the board as being a clone but at least it doesn’t use the Duet3D logo. It’s also good that they have added the holes to allow screw terminals to be fitted if the user requires.
The board I received had 3.4b6 installed so it won’t connect to a board thats running firmware version 3.3. Fortunately I run the latest beta’s so I was able to connect without issue. So far, I have tested the heater and fan outputs, driver and accelerometer and it works perfectly fine. One thing to note is that the schematics of the Fysetc version are not available. All the information about the Duet Toolboard can be found on github.
If you want a Duet Toolboard, the Fysetc version seems a viable alternative without breaking the bank.