I saw this on the 3d printer discussion & thought it would be worth

General CNC CNC Routers
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I saw this on the 3d printer discussion & thought it would be worth a look at here

Originally shared by Christian Ledermann

While most RepRap and 3D printer controller boards use an ATMega or other 8-bit microcontroller, the Smoothie uses a 32-bit ARM chip in the form of an NXP LPC Cortex-M3 chip. Not only does this allow the Smoothie to do some very cool things with your machine – native arcs and circles, for example, but this better hardware also allows for Ethernet, drag-and-drop firmware, and exposing the USB port as both a serial port or mass storage device.
http://hackaday.com/2013/09/30/smoothieboard-the-be-all-end-all-cnc-controller/

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Integrated stepper drivers limited to low current and 12V.
Stepper drivers like to burn and needy replacement.

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IMHO, at their asking price it’s getting close to linuxCNC on a Beagle Bone Black territory. Also I’ve seen comments that their lead developer is pretty bad about using other open source code without proper credit to the source (sloppy, not dishonest) which may lead to big problems in the future. Might be best to let this one settle out a bit.

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I keep wondering: what does the smoothie have over the tinyG? Doesn’t seem like anything significant.

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The biggest difference is the tinyG is a 16Mhz 8 bit AVR processor, smoothie is a 96 to 120 MHz 32 bit ARM processor (Kickstarter was a bit vague on quick read).

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@Kirk_Yarina Gah! I obviously misread the tinyG page. I had it in my head its an ARM as well, but it clearly isn’t.