Other Board possible?

Hi,
I‘ve got a question.

The SKR Pro 1.2 is in Germany not available on Amazon / eBay

Is this board equivalent?

BIGTREETECH Octopus V1.1

Can I use this one ? It seems to have all it needs.

Thanks for your help.

Greetings Matthias

Technically it’s not equivalent, really it has more capability but it is newer and not tested by the V1 community here. You won’t have pre-set up firmware packages like Ryan has created for his machines on the SKR Pro, but if you can get the firmware set up it will be able to run the machine.

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I second Heath’s observations. If you purchase any board V1 maintains Marlin firmware for (with the same drivers and screen), then getting your electronics running is easy. The SKR Pro is particularly easy since all you have to do is put a binary file on and SD card, and boot the board, plus, since that is a board they sell, the SKR Pro is well tested. The Octopus is not among the boards that V1 has firmware for. You will need to setup a build environment and probably do some research with respect to settings to get it running. Sometimes this is easy, but sometimes it is a struggle. The Octopus is one of the boards that is rolled into the standard Marlin build, so that helps.

As others have mentioned, the Octopus would definitely work, but it isn’t officially supported. So configuring the firmware may take some work if nobody else has a working setup you could piggy back off of. It’s really not hard to do if you’re already familiar with things like arduino and marlin (or grbl). Otherwise learning what’s going on under the hood enough to configure a cnc is going to make the overall setup experience too arduous for those who ‘just wanna cut something quick’. That’s where the real value is when you stick to officially supported hardware.

All that said, you can’t find a better community than MPCNC to bounce your questions off of if octopus was your only choice. A limiting factor would be if nobody here has the hardware on hand to play with. Octopus is kinda new and a bit on the overkill side for a cnc. So I am doubting anyone has an mpcnc setup with one, but it’s definitely an interesting piece of hardware for printers. Almost everyone here also prints. So there is a good chance someone may still be able to help you get your firmware working. I would bet the hardest part will be getting stuff like dual endstop homing working properly, because that usually requires editing outside the usual 2 config files.

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