My understanding is that it was done with a small profit motive. There are several shields for the Arduino's that targeted driving the steppers and extruders in repraps from several vendors.
http://reprap.org/wiki/List_of_electronics The only other reason I heard about was the lack of desire to use a PC for control when all they wanted was a small microcontroller, even though a PC was still required for the UI. Makerbot actually started out as open hardware and software non-profit group created to help advance early research in the area of open-source 3D printers. They later closed the UI when they got their first $10M in venture funding. On 06/27/2013 05:58 PM, Charles Buckley wrote: > > > > The whole fear of getting sued is a bit played out and does not really > explain why they went to trying to design what amounts to CNC controllers > from scratch. That whole process was pretty much out of patents prior to 3D > even being patented. Sure.. FDM and extruder heads makes sense. Still > patented when reprap started. But, motion control? Not even close. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
