If you haven’t looked around the RepRap project in a while, you probably haven’t heard about the Smoothieboard. It’s an extremely unique electronics board for 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC machines that is trying to get away from Atmel and AVR microcontrollers and towards more powerful ARM micros. On the Smoothieboard, you’ll find enough five motor drivers, six big ‘ol MOSFETs for hot ends, fans, and beds, enough thermistor inputs for just about anything, and an Ethernet jack, because all 3D printers should be able to run headless.
The team behind the Smoothieboard has decided there’s not enough awesome included in the Smoothieboard already. To fix this, they’re opening up a contest where coders, documentarians, graphic artists, and creatives of all types can contribute to the Smoothieboard project. What’s the prize? A Smoothieboard, duh.
The Smoothieboard team is looking for a few good coders, builders, or anyone else to contribute to the Smoothieboard project. If you have an idea that would work with the Smoothieboard – a web interface like Octoprint running on the Smoothieboard, better documentation, graphics, or just want to build a five-axis CNC mill, this is where you sign up. The prize is a Smoothieboard 5XC, the top of the line board with five motor drivers.
Of course you’re always welcome to not contribute to open source projects, and for those consummate consumers, we have the Smoothieboard 5XC available in the Hackaday Store.
You have until February 15th to come up with a great project idea for a Smoothieboard. The best 30 project ideas will be chosen, and those projects will get a Smoothieboard. Actually building a project in a month isn’t a condition of the contest; the best idea wins.
Awesome! Can’t wait to see what people do with this!
By the way, the link to the contest, is http://smoothiecontest.org
Thanks for the very nice article, hope we’ll get some neat entries from hackadayians.
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Done. Hope I did it right :)
That crooked row of green connectors isn’t very OCD friendly.
You can straighten them by hand pretty easily, takes a few minutes, I do that when I’m about to use a board :) It’s pretty satisfying :)
I got an idea….I got an idea….believe me win or lose I’m surprised that I came up with an idea!
You guys go play with the Smoothie. BeagleBone CRAMPS with MachineKit is better and about the same price when you include the BBB itself.
Well, I’m not sure you can just blanket say “it’s better” like that. If you say that it’s probably better for you, but that doesn’t mean it is for everybody. The BeagleBone sure has more computing power. But users say Smoothie is much easier to configure for example, and it brings together multiple communities, and things like that.
They are two different projects, no reason to be mean.
Also about price, Smoothieboard is actually slightly less expensive for 4 axes if you factor in shipping prices, and a tad more expensive for 5 axes.
I took a really hard look at both options several months ago and chose the smoothie.
It had better documentation, support, and the code is beautiful. I also needed a lot of additional pins which was easier to pull out of the smoothie (although still kind of ugly).
I also had to decide between MachineKit and Smoothie, I went with Smoothie. In retrospect I’m not 100% sure it was the correct choice. Seems like the software has problems and some of the core devs are quite hostile towards contributors. Some useful CNC features like “pause gcode, jog the head to e.g. replace endmill, resume gcode” will probably never be seen on Smoothie, while MachineKit/LinuxCNC apparently has them already.
Hey jpa !
Jim is not really hostile, he’s more like a guardian. Contributions are very welcome, we just have to make sure we let them in in a way that keeps the code base sane.
“pause gcode, jog the head to e.g. replace endmill, resume gcode” is currently being implemented, and there is pretty much no major feature we wouldn’t accept into the firmware.
It’s just that -some- features have to be implemented correctly before -some- others can be accepted.
Your contribution of the Spindle module was -very- welcome ! Thank you for that.
Jim can be strict about the quality of things that come in, and ask people to modify their code before it’s merged, but I think in the long run it’s a good thing.
And the contest itself, I think, is proof that we want more contributions.
I read recently that ARM microcontrollers are not significantly more expensive than AVRs. Why is it that we have not seen some intro level arduino ARM boards that are comparatively cheap(the teensy excluded of course)?
But we’ve seen them.
http://cz.mouser.com/Semiconductors/Embedded-Development-Tools/_/N-cxwd2?Keyword=nucleo&FS=True
http://cz.mouser.com/Semiconductors/Engineering-Development-Tools/Embedded-Development-Tools/Embedded-Processor-Development-Kits/_/N-cxwk4?Keyword=STM32+discovery&FS=True
http://cz.mouser.com/Embedded-Solutions/Engineering-Tools/Embedded-Development-Tools/Embedded-Processor-Development-Kits/_/N-cvw9o?Keyword=lpcxpresso&FS=True
http://cz.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Infineon-Technologies/KIT_XMC_2GO_XMC1100_V1/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMufQkBCeDJ17QHzy3oBflmEXhXH%2fxMB2UXAdR%2fX3wQzTg%3d%3d
http://cz.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Infineon-Technologies/KIT_XMC13_BOOT_001/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMufQkBCeDJ17Wt7SisfbMTsqn0nFXNVPgo%3d
http://cz.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Infineon-Technologies/KIT_XMC11_BOOT_001/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMufQkBCeDJ17Wt7SisfbMTs7xiGyS46vX4%3d
http://cz.mouser.com/Semiconductors/Engineering-Development-Tools/Embedded-Development-Tools/Embedded-Processor-Development-Kits/Development-Boards-Kits-ARM/_/N-cxwm3?Keyword=cy8ckit&FS=True
http://cz.mouser.com/Search/Refine.aspx?Keyword=EK-TM4C
Just to name a few dozens of them.
I stand corrected, my apologies. I will look into it, thanks
I like mbed. Quite easy to program. Lots of libs (lots of them ported from Arduino). And you can get embed-enabled boards from $10.
See here the supported platforms: https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/
I switched from Arduino to mbed cause I needed more memory for driving displays and small boards.
I remember looking at the Smoothieboard back when I was converting a DC-K40 laser. I went with a quicker and more familiar solution but good to see it’s still going. The contest sounds like a great idea. A bit of momentum could take it from a good to a great project.
“It’s an extremely unique electronics board…” Hmmm. “Unique” means there is just one of them. So does “extremely unique” mean there is less than one of them?
Yep. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?
So what ever happened to this, Arthur?
The last thing on the contest page is a note saying you have had a lot of entries, that was six months ago.
Hoping to get back to this soon. A few people got their boards, but I still have a lot of entries to process, and it’s going slow.