FPGA

i was wondering,
i keep reading about the RepRap project, and i see constant reference for microcontrollers.
why not use an FPGA chip, it has real parallelism , and is faster, so it can give a more accurate response, is it just the price?
or is there something else?

You might want to look at this thread in these forums.

[forums.reprap.org]

i read it
nice
and i think Andy Kirby is rite, hobby electronic is fading, i thought i was the only one noticing it, its only a matter of time before there will be nothing else to buy but SOC (system on chip), soldering those parts wasn't made for man.
but i didn't get the conclusion, was it decided to use FPGA?
i sure hope so, the RepRap will hit a barrier without real time and a good positioning system (i read about the magnetic encoder, but its not a real solution, you don't fiscally know the position you didact it)

I think that part of the reason for using a microcontroller (like the Arduino) instead of a gate array is that there are many more people experienced with procedural programming languages like C++ than there are people experienced in programing gate arrays. I would have no idea how to implement G-Code or the Bresenham line drawing algorithm in a gate array.

ok
its on me then, my control processing unit for my project will be implemented using fpga, so i will release the code when i am finished.
i also need to write an interpreter so you will have a full packet.
but don't hold your breath, it will take a while.