@Samer_Najia 3 in 1 ? 
@Arthur_Wolf well yes. Last year (was it last year?) I built an all metal version of the SmartRap for the Hackaday contest. I ditched all the printed parts and replaced it with plate metal. The intent was to be able to park a toolhead on it so that I could use a laser, a small dremel and an extruder. Sadly I had to limit the travel of the cantilevered arm because the moment for the dremel was too much for cutting anything harder than, well, depron. So I abandoned that idea of the arm and built a traditional machine out scrap acrylic. That darn thing is super rigid (I used what I learned from building a Fab@Home Model 2). Then, well, I met +Peter van der Walt and a few messaged back and forth and a year later he puts out the OpenCNC in the public domain and now I see the way forward…and then I meet Smoothieboard and voila! Mechanical and Electronic solution! Sort of. But certainly further than my feeble attempts…so, a belated thanks for all your work.
We make our printrboard in house on top of the line equipment. Its quality. The cogs (cost) is a little less than $50 and I think we sell it for $99. We can make a 12v board w/o bells and whistles for $30 (our cost), but we choose to get high quality parts and (over) spec it to accept 24v. The 24v psu is a deal breaker for inexpensive bots.
The ARM boards are nice, but unless you are doing a delta that benefits from more horse power, the final product of the printed parts on an 8 bit bot are currently the same resolution as an arm board.
We are working on a Tinyg printrboard that proves the final speed and resolution WILL be better on this arm board. I have prints to prove it. The difference is the firmware. It’s pretty crazy how well it prints.
Until we finish the design and release it, Marlin + printrboard does pretty well.
These things are largely a matter of preference. I haven’t seen a side by side comparison of the printrboard next to a Rambo or smoothie board but that would be fun to judge the final prints… Especially if all other hardware was the same.
More money should result in better prints in my opinion. Our Tinyg board will deliver- a little more expensive, but truly better prints. My opinion is it will best all other boards on the market today bar none. And paired w our wifi and touch LCD, in development, it will bring unseen ease of use features at a new low cost, all-in.
The market has been a little stagnant lately for innovation in the electronics department… I blame Marlin. I think that will change this year with what we - and others- are doing.
@Brook_Drumm we darn it, sell me a beta and I will rig a delta and an i3 and try all sorts of boards with this one. Can’t wait to fiddle with the touchscreen too. Oh and BTW, I’m doing the tank in metal. Pololu never responded to my quote request for the tank chassis in acrylic.
@Brook_Drumm :
« The ARM boards are nice, but unless you are doing a delta that benefits from more horse power, the final product of the printed parts on an 8 bit bot are currently the same resolution as an arm board. »
I have to disagree strongly here. It’s going to heavily depend on the printer and it’s build quality, but even at low-ish speeds, users report differences in print quality between a Marlin board and a Smoothie-based board. While those can be minimal at low speed, it gets more significant as speed increases. I’m talking cartesian here. It’s even more pronounced on a delta of course.
Marlin takes a lot of shortcuts, that we taught Smoothie not to take over the years, resulting in step generation/acceleration that is much closer to the “theoretical ideal”.
And better planning/step generation/acceleration is not the only thing Smoothie gives you, you also get plenty more features, awesome documentation ( https://plus.google.com/+JeremieFrancois/posts/RpaLn7hU6vx ), the largest community around, and a ton of things that are just done better, either because there is more processing power, or just because we worked on it very hard.
@Arthur_Wolf , did delta grid mapping ever get added to smoothie?
@ThantiK I think it’s being worked on right now.
@Arthur_Wolf Perhaps a dumb question, but can Smoothieware run on a TinyG v8? (I ask because I have one on my Ox CNC)
@Arthur_Wolf . I totally understand your viewpoint!! And applaud all the great work on smoothie board.
Very good point on the hardware, you have to test on same hardware - not all hardware is created equal, for sure. And not all Marlin boards are equal either. My biased opinion is that ours is too notch. But I hate Marlin enough to have my software guy rewrite the entire thing, so I will not defend where Marlin is going… I think it’s end of life. I’m just impressed with how far we have come with it. Seriously, and when you look at the code- it’s a complete shocker!!
Anyway, I’m a fan of all this stuff and especially those innovating. While your points are well taken, I don’t see anyone developing electronics that improves the print quality (yet… Stay tuned).
Ease of use is the biggest deal for users and it sounds like smoothie improves that. Our biggest victory w the printrboard was auto “leveling”… People like the convenience. Our next big move is UI (touch screen), free cloud services, wifi, control and monitoring from any browser, anywhere, even the phone. We are actually doing this on a printrboard first so we are squeezing the most we can out of modest hardware. I think this type of ease of use features and convenience is huge for the customer. Later this year, we will introduce the Tinyg printrboard and take on all challengers in speed and print quality… Not to mention completely clean, extremely well thought out code. 
Peace
Brook
@Brook_Drumm , I can’t wait to see all these improvements. When electronics go true consumer quality, then you will sell them like hotcakes.
Can’t wait to see it @Brook_Drumm , Hopefully we can add support for other boards by utilizing a library or hardware abstraction layer. I’m curious what MCU was chosen for the project. I researched TinyG a bit, and the improved accel/jerk is a much needed upgrade (and abstracting that to the extruder is no small feat, especially when you add in pressure advance).
@SirGeekALot Smoothie only runs on the LPC1769, which you can find in a few boards. It’s unlikely it can be ported gracefully on less powerful chips like the one you mentionned.
@Brook_Drumm >>Our biggest victory w the printrboard was auto “leveling”<<. Totally agree. It is not perfect, but damn, what an improvement in ease of use! Most of the time I just fire off a print and forget it. Before I used to watch the entire first layer because it could fail at any time. No more. Love it! Also agree with your Marlin comments. It looks like spaghetti code to me. Amazing that it works at all. But work it does, and I’ve been very happy with it. My next printer build (if I ever get around to it) may use a different control board. Then again, I still have an unused Printrboard (plus an Extrudrboard) and a RAMPS (with some DRV8825 drivers) so I may limp along with those first. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing what you create with a TinyG. Good luck!
@Stephanie_A >>hardware abstraction layer<< Best firmware idea I’ve heard in a long time. That could make a good control layer separate from the board, which could have many benefits in the long run.
@SirGeekALot Smoothie has a HAL by using the mBed libraries. It’s not perfect yet, but we are going to be much closer to the HAL model in Smoothie2.
@Arthur_Wolf Ok, I thought as much. Thanks for the reply.
@Arthur_Wolf Cool!! Any idea when Smoothie2 will be available? Also, is there going to be a new Smoothieboard v2 along with it?
@SirGeekALot No idea, and yes 
Of course, it would be super cool if Smoothie2 runs on Smoothieboard V1s. All this Smoothie talk makes me want to go get a Mango Smoothie…
@Samer_Najia Smoothie2 will be specifically designed to take advantage of the additional ram, flash, peripherals and cpu power of the Smoothieboard v2’s newer MCU. While it should be possible to port it back to the v1 boards, it’d probably come at a severe cost in terms of performance.