Sad story about firmware & support for 3D-printer Lerdge control boards

I was forced to write this text due to events in the official Lerdge group on FaceBook. Unfortunately, the company staff has demonstrated its complete incompetence both in matters of technical support for users and client communications.

I will start with the fact that all firmware for Lerdge boards (3D printer control boards) are proprietary (with closed code). This is not a big deal, but only if the equipment manufacturer pays enough attention to the quality of the firmware: both at the programming stage and at the testing stage. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Lerdge.


The first oddity was the bridge cooling algorithm. Lerdge firmware analyze code while splitting cooling and displacement / extrusion instructions into two threads. The result was the impossibility of normal cooling of the bridge during printing: the beginning and end of the bridge cooling and the beginning and end of the bridge printing were separated by at least a few seconds. The reason is that move commands are placed in the command queue, and cooling commands are executed immediately. They were repeatedly asked to change the cooling logic, and finally it was promised that normal printing cooling would appear in 3.0.7.

But at the same time, their programmer decided to add the function of precise control of the plastic pressure in the nozzle, known as linear adwance, to 3.0.7. As it became clear later, this ill-conceived decision created big problems with the working capacity of 3.0.7.

Version 3.0.7 was released on March 2, 2020. Immediately after this, users began to complain about errors and on March 4, 2020 Lerdge released a modified 3.0.7. The new version 3.0.7 also ended up with errors, and on March 13, 2020, Lerdge released the 3.0.7 change again. Please note: they did not even consider it necessary to change the minor version number!

There were a lot of messages in the FB group with comments and information on bugs and problems. The reaction of the Lerdge staff was interesting: rather rude reciprocal comments, and then the removal of all "unwanted" messages and their authors from the FB group. If there are no messages about the problem, then there is no problem!

Below are photos illustrating problems with firmware 3.0.7. Can Lerdge fix these firmware errors without introducing new ones? More likely no than yes. This is my opinion as a user of firmware from 2.0.2 to 3.0.7 inclusive.

It is very unfortunate that, due to the incompetence of Lerdge programmers, users of the products of this company have to migrate to other platforms, such as SKR and Duet. Lerdge does not value the loyalty and constructive criticism from its users.

All photos below ­- for CoreXY kinematic system (H-Bot printers). What is interesting here is that there are no such complaints from users of printers with other kinematic systems (Prusa-style, Delta printers). Or "not yet"?

Set 1 (the same G-code & accelerations for all prints)

Set 2

Set 3

Set 4

3.0.7