I spent a lot of time, on and off over the last year, developing a heuristic calibration extension to Smoothieware that can be used to calibrate linear delta (Rostock-style) robots. If I billed commercial rates, the work would easily be over $10K. I released it for free because I take pride in my work, and get a kick out of seeing other people benefit from it. However, recent events have convinced me that it's time to start looking for a new board to port my work to.
As detailed in this thread, I bought two Smoothieboard 5XCs, and one of them arrived with two capacitors improperly soldered. One fell off the board on its own, and the other was so poorly soldered that it peeled off with almost no effort. The other capacitors were all solidly connected, so I know this isn't just an issue with a flimsy component. I like the community and the firmware, but firmware is nothing without hardware to run it on, and in my opinion their hardware platform is a joke - a really bad one, played at the user's expense. They know that their hardware manufacturing process is broken. They know that their quality control process is broken, and that as a result, they're shipping out boards with parts literally hanging off them.
To make matters worse, Uberclock, their US distributor, has ignored two emails I sent about this issue over the last month. I now have to go to my credit card issuer, and file a dispute to get my money back. The defective board is a slap in the face, and the lack of support from Uberclock is also a slap in the face. I am so disappointed in whoever is doing the hardware manufacturing, and Uberclock? I straight up don't like that company. I didn't do all this work, FOR FREE, just to be treated like crap - and if this is how they treat a contributor like me, why would a regular end user want to have anything to do with them? They have dropped the ball here, and they're watching it bounce away while they still take money for these damned things.
I'm also not a big fan of the old cell phone processor they use. It has 64K, but it's segmented into three areas (32+16+16). That required me to spend several days migrating memory from one bus to another. On top of that, they're already feeling the pinch - only a few K are free under normal operating conditions. If you have an LCD panel, you have to turn it off to run the calibration section of my firmware. That's not a good user experience. They are working on a new platform with an Intel Edison chip that will have exponentially more RAM - but who's gonna manufacture it? The same people that ship boards with capacitors falling off?
Thanks, I'll pass.I can't go back to Arduino-based controllers. Marlin and Repetier have too much spaghetti (which the Arduino IDE actively encourages), and getting my code to run in 4K of RAM (much of which is already taken) would be very annoying for me. I don't want to spend my time on that.
What's the new hotness in 3D printer/CNC controllers? I want something with decent RAM - at least 64K (in one memory segment, not three) - and at least a "sorta fast" CPU. Smoothie runs at 100-120MHz, which is adequate. (Arduinos are 16MHz - not enough.) More speed is always nice, but 100MHz is enough.
