Using a Parallella to slice and network my printer

[www.adapteva.com]

I'm thinking this would make a fun project. For $99 I could set up this linux computer to slice and host my printer on the network.

I'm thinking it could even be used to replace the printers board by adding some stepper drivers and whatnot.

What do you guys think?

Depends what you're aiming for:

1) Networking - a cheaper alternative would be raspberry pi
2) Slicing - unless you write your own slicer specifically to take advantage of the Parallella Epiphany co-processor, it's going to be a lot slower than your laptop/desktop
3) Re stepper drivers - generally the reason for RAMPS etc is that driving the motors must be real-time. A Parallella board (being just a computer) would have an OS with interrupts. That'll mean problems with your prints.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/31/2013 11:01AM by marcosscriven.

That might be good, it would take a lot of work to rewrite the slicer in C/C++ to take advantage of the parallelization. I don't see a price quoted for the SDK, so that does not give a warm feeling.

Otherwise it is just an ARM 9 platform, so like a Raspberry Pi but more expensive.

I think a promising platform is still UDOO, also $99, but more usefully with an Arduino Due built in, so (when its ready) the RAMPS-Due will plug straight in, and all (most of) the familiar RepRap software will run without much modification.

Another contender is BeagleBone Black + Replicape, haven't seen any shipping prices for that yet. I think that is a whole new set of software though to drive the Replicape.

I have a prototype RAMPS-Due being built right now, progress is a bit slow due to the weather...