BeagleBones At MRRF

[Jason Kridner] – the BeagleBone guy – headed out to the Midwest RepRap Festival this weekend. There are a lot of single board computers out there, but the BeagleBoard and Bone are perfectly suited for controlling printers, and motion control systems thanks to the real-time PRUs on board. It’s not the board for you if you want to play retro video games or build a media center; it’s the board for building stuff.

Of interest at the BeagleBooth were a few capes specifically designed for CNC and 3D printing work. There was the CRAMPS, a clone of the very popular RAMPS 3D printer electronics board made for the Beagle. If you’re trying to control an old mill that is only controllable through a parallel port, here’s the board for you. There are 3D printer boards with absurd layouts that work well as both printer controller boards and the reason why you should never come up with the name of something before you build it.

[Jason]’s trip out to MRRF wasn’t only about extolling the virtues of PRUs; Machinekit, a great motion control software, was also there, running on a few Beagles. The printer at the BeagleBooth was running Machinekit and apart from a few lines of GCode that sent the head crashing into the part, everything was working great.

7 thoughts on “BeagleBones At MRRF

    1. Oops, wrong thread (i was watching a video that i clicked from this page at the end of the video of this page… That video was also from hackaday. That video was scoop noob:DDS and False trigger, and split port timing delay.

  1. I saw Jason’s presentation, it was great, as was the rest of MRRF. It was great to have a nice geekfest out here in the hinterlands of North Central Indiana. It was worth the trip.

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