Wow, I never even realized that the original smoothie was lacking an FPU. Love the idea of an FPGA (Going with Lattice’s iCE40 FPGA?)
@ThantiK Yep, LPC1769 doesn’t have a FPU. It’s not been a real problem, we have plenty of power for what we are doing. But getting one will be very neat 
For the FPGA we are going for a Spartan6 LX9. The same the papillio.cc guys use.
I’m certainly interested in it too, regardless the cost. I asked about the iCE40 FPGA because it apparently has a completely open source build environment ready for it. v.s. the Spartan6 LX9, which I believe will require proprietary (potentially windows-only) software to compile.
It sounds like a lot of potential. I appreciate the updates. I’m eager to see it unfold.
@ThantiK Xilinx offers a linux toolchain free to download but still closed source: http://www.xilinx.com/support/download.html
Very nice, thanks for the update. Particularly interested in the possibilities the fpga opens up. Can’t wait to see what the next instalment brings… Bring it on!
@Ross_Bagley Well, the low level stuff I’d assume is straightforward. But for example for USB, we need to implement a MTP interface, and that’s not trivial. Same for Ethernet for which we need an IP stack, a web server, etc.
So looks like I need to start saving up money then
Anyways, great news, thanks for the update!
Good Work Arthur! I will follow the news on the board development. A question: I see that you will use a “true” SDIO instead of spi for faster SD transfer, but I always ask myself why not use the USB host port for reading directly the gcode files. In my opinioni USB flash disks / dongle are more common and fast than SD cards, especially for loading and exchanging files. I think that the sdcard choice for 3D printers was due to direct interface with AVR 8bit microcontrollor, but I hope that this is superseeded with ARM 32 bit MC. Am I wrong?
@Stefano_Pavanello On the previous board, the USB port was dedicated to communication with the host. On the new board, we have a second USB port that can be used for what you describe ( when that is coded of course ).
We’ll still need the on-board SD card for storing configuration etc … but USB dongles will be usable on the new board.
Thank you! Yes, is what I think as best configuration, the internal SD for storing config etc… And have a dedicated USB port for example on the front panel to load gcode files from USB stick.
@Arthur_Wolf at Pro version you don’t need webserver/usb on smoothie, while you have Edison