I want to share with you some nice developing story: We are developing a open source platform for 3D printing and CNC - the T-Bone.
First of all it is just an 5-Axis stopper motor motion controller for the BeagleBone. But if you digg a bit deeper into the details I think it is quite awesome. By relying on othe open source implementations for this topic we were able to integrate all the best solutions in a fraction of time to develop everything ourselves:
- The motion planning is adapted from the awesome TinyG software, the 3D printing adaption from the Marlin firmware
- The web Interface for the 3D Printer is using the excellent Octoprint GUI
- The schematic integrated the open source Arduino Leonardo as realtime MCU
- We borrowed ideas and solutions from the RAMPS board and the Replicape
By reusing everything that was the same as other CNC and 3D printing boards we could focus on implementing novel features. First of all we created a very special architecture which reduced the real time requirements for the beagle bone massively so that we can implement all 3D printing and CNC features easily in Python. Second we can use all features of the great Trinamic chips we have used. This enables for example homing without having mechanical end switches wired – magically by detecting the motor load while carefully touching the mechanical frame!
And giving back this solution as Open Source (CC-BY-SA for the hardware and AGPL v3 for the software) gives the warm fuzzy feeling of contributing some really cool solution …
Currently we are trying to find enough funding for our first production run on indiegogo. So if you like this project support us by buying a board, t-shirt or sticker.
I hope you like this project. What do you think? Is such a high level programming approach something you could use in your work and projects??
