What are your thoughts on the "smoothieboard ". This is currently hot on G+.
Originally shared by Jason Richardson
Last chance to get in on the Smoothieboard kickstarter!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/logxen/smoothieboard-the-future-of-cnc-motion-control
How is it different from TinyG?
TinyG can likely handle more but is not heavily promoted & supported by investors on kickstarter who do not know about TinyG. Thanks for your input Rob.
“the future of CNC motion control” is just rubbish. It’s a compact single-board solution for a very specific niche market i.e. stepper motor driven low to mid performance 3-axis 3D printers.
@Rob_Roschewsk I asked the same question, and it looks like the big difference is the CPU. TinyG is on an Amtel, same as an arduino, Smoothie is on an ARM. Also, while the tinyG understands 6 axis, it cannot drive 6 axis, only 4. Smoothie will drive 5, although I don’t know if it understands 6 like tinyG. TinyG is also a mature product, having seen a few revs,while smoothie has not seen mass-production yet.
@Richard_Betel I saw TinyG in action at Makerfaire NYC 2013 … looked impressive and I had a nice chat with the folks at the booth.
Understand about the axis limitations … but I don’t think I care for what I want to do. I also like that it’s a mature product.
TinyG sounds pretty good to me, too. I wish they had a 5 or 6 axis in planning, personally.
So I run grbl on an arduino which is atmega chip. At what point is the processing power of the chip more significant than the mechanical limits of the machine? I’m fairly sure I can try to drive my home built CNC faster than the motors can deliver torque enough to move the machine at that speed. I guess I’m wondering how much of that extra processing power is real versus theoretical gains.
@Daniel_Would That’s not entirely straightforward to answer. My experience with 3D printers is that even if you’re moving at a slow speed, you can max out the cpu with 2 things: 1) depending on your board, the USB port is more software than hardware, which means just the bandwidth can max you out. 2) gcode for curves can use alot of cycles to compute a path. So the part you’re making (size AND shape) can have a big impact on the amount of CPU you need. This sort of thing just wouldn’t be an issue on a smoothie.