Race to the bottom Contest

A new contest for the electronics designers out there. Please feel free to talk this up anywhere and everywhere you like. Good publicity is very important to a contest like this. For example, during the sign up period of the Vertical X Axis contest, after a month of near daily posting everywhere I could think of, while enduring the grumbles of the very active reprapers about spamming, and "We've all heard this before, just shut up already." I still got "Contest, what contest?" reactions from people in the community. I even had a designer who would have entered but was too late because he hadn't heard about the contest in time.

Rules and prizes are described here

Race to the bottom

Isn't Gen7T about the lowest cost through hole version? I don't see how you can get any cheaper than that. GEN7 uses under specified FETs and connectors and lacks fan and SD card so it is in fact too cheap for most people's tastes.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

Yes but it is still dependant on the relatively expensive Pololu driver boards. So after etching your own board and buying the cheapest components you can, then dropping $50 on Pololu's, you haven't saved much over just buying a printrboard or similar prebuilt design. A design with integrated through hole driver chips would be quite a bit cheaper to source without necessarily being cheaper in quality terms. Once you get the total BOM under $50 or so (including drivers) it becomes more practical to spend time building a design because you actually get something for your time.

No Gen7T uses Toshiba thru hole chips. You should know, you designed it didn't you?

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

Oh, didn't see the T there. Yes it is, but it didn't work out as a single sided design so I'm currently reworking it into a double sided design. That will likely give me the flexibility to use fuses and add some other features like SD card adapter pinouts and fan connectors. At the same time I'm not that much of a circuit board designer and I think the concept really deserves more than a single or even a couple designs. There were lots of different Pololu boards out there before everyone kind of congealed around RAMPS, Gen7 and Sanguinololu. I'm hoping for a similar ecology in the through hole design space.

Been wanting to do something like this for a while now, so i've thrown my hat into the ring!

Awesome! Welcome to the contest. Be sure to add your page to the entrants list ASAP to get the most points.

And good luck!

Bryan

There's been a significant change to the contest. SMD designs are now allowed. I was convinced that SMC designs could be just as easy to assemble at home as through hole designs. But to be clear this is still a contest for DIY designs, so any SMD designs should be significantly different from the current crop in terms of ease of assembly.

There has been a significant upgrade to the first prize award! It will now include steppers and a nice power supply in addition to the Sanguinololu electronics and Prusa heated bed. I have dug deep into my personal stash in an effort to push the contest over the top and get a few more entries before the deadline. Hope this will convince those out there that were on the fence to enter.

Also I will post one more request here for a mention in your blog, etc. Publicity is very important to a contest such as this.

Our third contestant has entered, so the contest is officially on! You can still enter till the 13th. That's less than a week away.

A few hours left!

So the contest is on! We had one last minute entry. He was a bit late but he asked so sweetly that I figured why not. Plus the tibot entry brings the total projects including the Hare to 7. And as we all know 7 is a very auspicious number. So the entry phase is now closed and the contest phase begins. A hearty good luck to all the contestants. I can't wait to see what you all come up with.

And a quick note to the contestants. Please PM me an email address I can use during the contest to contact you with announcements, questions etc. I should have posted that as a requirement to enter. It just makes my job a lot easier if I have that info early on.

Bryan

By vote of the contestants the contest deadline has been moved to Dec 13.

I am getting ready to move out of state and don't have time to judge the contest and send prizes right now. Also it seems I was a bit too optimistic about development time for a set of electronics and I'd like to see a few more contestants get up and running. So I've decided to postpone the contest deadline one final time to Jan 13 2013. Good luck to all the contestants.

Bryan

Contests is over. Prizes are being assembled and sent. A big congratulations to the winners!

Bryan

Winners please send me an address where prizes can be shipped.

Bryan