On Sat, 2011-06-11 at 23:54 -0700, Mike Payson wrote: > that is a limitation of the Makerbot firmware.
As nearly as I can tell, ReplicatorG has become sufficiently intertwingled with the firmware that it's best to not stray too far from the beaten path, so I'll continue to use the 2.7 firmware until things settle down a bit. RepG 24 has 17 different drivers for various combinations of machines / firmware / configurations and it's not at all clear what works with what. I used to like being a beta tester, but I've gotten over it... > integrated MCU based driver The problem with that is economics: right now, the hardware cost for the microcontroller(s) and motherboards has run up against the cost of an ATX system board. In fact, the MBI retail price for the Ardino / Motherboard / Extruder Controller exceeds the full-up Atom I'm using with the Sherline. There's not all that much horsepower in an 8-bit microcontroller and the firmware is bumping up against those limits, too. I expect the next generation will use an ARM or some such, at the economics will definitely favor a commodity PC and a very cheap analog interface board; you need pretty much the same stepper drivers for either one. All the firmware does is eat G-Code and spit out parts; that's exactly what EMC2 does with my Sherline mill. I think it'd be a whole lot easier and less expensive to use EMC2 for motion control than to re-invent all those functions and jam them into an Arduino. Plus, you'd get a much better user interface, bigger displays, better keyboards, and a much more stable system for free. The fact that the "computer" inside the printer is a PC running EMC2, instead of a microcontroller running something else, is largely irrelevant. From the outside, you feed either printer with G-Code from Skeinforge it produces parts; the advantage of using EMC2 is that developers can concentrate on improving *printing* rather then reinventing motion control / UI wheels. I'd like to do it just to show how it works, but ... not right now. -- Ed http://softsolder.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EditLive Enterprise is the world's most technically advanced content authoring tool. Experience the power of Track Changes, Inline Image Editing and ensure content is compliant with Accessibility Checking. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ephox-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
