Digital Fabrication Control - Hack Your Own

The Smoothieboard wants to bring digital fabrication capability to the world. The vision of the project is to create a firmware to run 3d printers, laser cutters, cnc mills and more. The package is designed to be powerful, inexpensive, and entirely open source.

Instead of learning one software for the cnc mill, another for a 3d printer and another for a laser cutter, you can use Smoothie firmware to control all of your digital robotic machines. The board itself consists of an NXP LPC176x microcontroller, Allegro stepper drivers, and several ports for expansion based on future needs.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/logxen/smoothieboard-the-future-of-cnc-motion-control

The project is three years old, and this Kickstarter funding round is being held to scale up production, not to prove the concept. Over two hundred boards have already been built. There is also a large community already working, hacking and improving the software itself, on the #smoothieware IRC channel. The lead developers have even placed their email and IRC contact info in the Kickstarter and their website. 3d printing, laser cutting, and cnc milling functionality using the board is shown on a series of videos at the Smoothie Project website.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/logxen/smoothieboard-the-future-of-cnc-motion-control

There’s an exciting novelty that comes not just from all of the functions but the open source possibilities that haven’t yet been realized. The SmoothiePanel is a project in development aimed at bringing RGB display capabilities to any machine with I2C available. The expansion options along with the open source community pushing the boundaries of this device look to make the project a continuing success.