3d printer

[pberrett]

Hi all

One use I can see for the Raspberry Pi is as a substitute for a Arduino in an open source 3d printer eg Reprap. It has the grunt to do the job as well as, if not better than an Arduino.

Further the low cost of the Pi means that it can help bring down the cost of 3d printers.

cheers Peter

[Prometheus]

If it's of any interest, there appears to be another thread about using the Raspberry Pi with a RepRap, here - it's got some quite interesting posts about it.

[Chris.Rowland]

Most of the cost in a 3D printer is in the hardware - motors and the physical stuff that causes them to put things in the right place.

The Arduino may be better for the low level task of controlling the motors and extruder because it doesn't have an OS to get in the way of that low level, real time control.  The Pi would be more suited to controlling the Arduino.

It would be possible to use the Pi directly, but it would work better if it didn't have Linux on it.

Hope this makes sense, I'm pretty close to my limit here...

Chris