Raspberry

did you see the raspberry ? [www.raspberrypi.org]
"an ultra-low-cost computer...expected price is $25"

after the little sanguinololu, maybe a little computer to controle the machine ^^

I saw that too. It looks cool. I am trying not to get my hopes up too much about the price though. These types of projects always seem to go over budget. Put a real time Linux OS on there and you could run reprap plus all sorts of peripherals off it. Plus the display is your TV (or a pico projector? Doesn't seem to have too much IO though, so you might have to put an IO expander board or something on it before you can run a reprap.

There have been quite a few updates recently, check out [www.raspberrypi.org]

They are looking at shipping boards in November, two different models, $25 and $35

In terms of IO, the spec looks a bit tight, but do-able IIRC 16 GPIO pins.

I think it would be an excellent addition to a 3D printer. It would allow you to get the printer on the network, it should have enough processing power to do slicing (though not as quickly as on a gruntier pc), and the HDMI and USB connectivity would allow for funky touchscreen interfaces.

Cheers,

Doug.

Or one could download a firmware like SJFW and ditch the PC to printer connection all together. The PC is only needed for the design / slicing / gcode generation.

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Charles Gantt.
Build blog [themakersworkbench.com] <---- my personal site
Build worklong [www.thebestcasescenario.com]

The Raspberry Pi (model is due to be released in the next few days/weeks

I was wondering if anyone had ARM binaries for any of the RepRap host and slicing software?

If they are or they can be compiled then I could see it being an awesome addition to any RepRap setup. I'm thinking hook it up to the electronics via usb, attach to a router via ethernet and power on, then just remotely push files onto it to slice, dice and cook.

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My Reprap blog

jds-reprap.blogspot.com

JoeDaStudd Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The Raspberry Pi (model is due to be released
> in the next few days/weeks
>
> I was wondering if anyone had ARM binaries for any
> of the RepRap host and slicing software?
>
> If they are or they can be compiled then I could
> see it being an awesome addition to any RepRap
> setup. I'm thinking hook it up to the electronics
> via usb, attach to a router via ethernet and power
> on, then just remotely push files onto it to
> slice, dice and cook.

I thought most of these were written in Java, so should be platform independent.

It'll be a lot slower on the Pi compared to a modern pc.

Good point.

The advantage of the Pi is its about the same size as RAMPS (without the mega), runs off 3.5W, silent and costs about £25 for the full version.

I was planning on buying one as soon as they are out to run xbmc and hopefully another to tinker with.
I just figuired if it could run xmbc and some of the other apps they demo'd it would be too much slower then using a conventional pc.

I suppose I'll have to wait and see.

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My Reprap blog

jds-reprap.blogspot.com

Seems like the ultimate use of the Pi would be as a replacement for both the computer and the arduino. Just have a RAMPS like board plug directly into the Pi. Of course that would be a bunch of new code to write, and might not be usefull for any other machine.

The trouble is the Raspberry Pi only has a single serial port spare. So you wouldn't have enough i/o ports to directly use RAMPS or any other solution without a micro-controller (well as far as I'm aware).

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My Reprap blog

jds-reprap.blogspot.com