Skydog

[dan_berry]

@karaelena I wasn’t aware they were taking ALL driver control out of the equation… but by doing that they’ve only radically simplified the stepper motion control, they haven’t eliminated it completely. A better quote from Dan would have been:

@dan

Funny Glowforge genesis story: I was going back and forth with Mark, our CTO, between closed-loop (servos, which I was advocating) and open-loop (steppers). He made a better case for steppers. Finally I said, “Well hell, if you want to go open loop, you don’t even need local control at all. Just put the damn motion controller in the server.” I didn’t actually realize what I’d suggested until Mark stared at me like I was from Mars for a while and it dawned on both of us just how powerful that could be.

Chilipeppr relies on two processors: a TinyG (or Atmel 328 running Grbl) for the G-Code interpretation, motion planning and stepper control… and a RPi for the user-friendly web-based front-end.

Skipping to using a (insert real-time OS embedded PC here, because timing is critical) doesn’t have to be responsive to end-users except through a BBB (blinking blue button) for the most part. There’s no reason such a setup couldn’t, say, translate G-code into motion control and then process the output as well once it’s done… IF GF were to flop. But I’m optimistic that’s a big ‘if’.