Smoothieboard Who's using it

[printbus]

Well, I use Simplify3D with Smoothie and it currently seems to be fine. I had a few hang issues before, but not since updating Simplify3D to v3. You just *do not* want to ask for help with it, at least not in the IRC channel.

I wouldn't wait for the new smoothieboard. It comes up in the IRC channel fairly regularly. The board developers simply will not commit to a promise date. It probably doesn't help that there will be, as I understand it, different versions. The "pro" version will have an FPGA core on it too yet. It has been apparent that there's been a major push on smoothieware firmware evolvement this year. It could be that the developers wanted that TCO first in order to establish a fairly solid baseline that would then be migrated to the new board, but that's just me guessing.

True, the current v1.0 smoothieboard may not be pushing the current envelope, but it's farther along the evolution path than an 8-bit Atmel ATMEGA processor with a RAMPS shield.

[tpete61]

Well, I use Simplify3D with Smoothie and it currently seems to be fine. I had a few hang issues before, but not since updating Simplify3D to v3. You just *do not* want to ask for help with it, at least not in the IRC channel.

I wouldn't wait for the new smoothieboard. It comes up in the IRC channel fairly regularly. The board developers simply will not commit to a promise date. It probably doesn't help that there will be, as I understand it, different versions. The "pro" version will have an FPGA core on it too yet. It has been apparent that there's been a major push on smoothieware firmware evolvement this year. It could be that the developers wanted that TCO first in order to establish a fairly solid baseline that would then be migrated to the new board, but that's just me guessing.

True, the current v1.0 smoothieboard may not be pushing the current envelope, but it's farther along the evolution path than an 8-bit Atmel ATMEGA processor with a RAMPS shield.

The Duetwifi has a 32 bit processor. That alone doesn't make one board substantially better than another that I can see. There are a number of other things that are different. The stepper drivers are much better. The duet has expansion capabilities that the Smoothie does not. I'm not an electrical engineer but they are certainly different and one might want to make comparisons based on desirability of certain features.

[printbus]

The Duetwifi has a 32 bit processor. That alone doesn't make one board substantially better than another that I can see. There are a number of other things that are different. The stepper drivers are much better. The duet has expansion capabilities that the Smoothie does not. I'm not an electrical engineer but they are certainly different and one might want to make comparisons based on desirability of certain features.

Agreed. The question on the table was whether anyone had updates on replacing RAMPS with a Smoothieboard, which is what I've tried to address. I'll clarify that I wasn't trying to come across as a Smoothieboard fan-boy. There's probably some number of boards that can be argued as "better" than smoothie, especially viewed from the needs of a particular user. Even in early 2015 when I bought my Smoothieboard I was aware it wasn't the latest thing out there. But my priorities at the time were in migrating to a board with a proven track record, immediate availability, access to support, having a firmware solution not built on Arduino, and where firmware development was occurring with more structure and test than what Marlin had at the time.

[arthurwolf]

Hey all, Arthur from the Smoothie project here with my 2 cents

Note: If you use Simplify3D, you never want to admit to it in at least the Smoothieware IRC channel. Being closed and for-profit, the Smoothie developers outright declare Simplify3D as being incompatible with Smoothie and pretty much refuse to help those people using it.

As others have said if you use Simplify3D forget it!

You just *do not* want to ask for help with it, at least not in the IRC channel.

I want to address these. For over a year, S3D had a bug that caused it to produce insanely bad gcode, that would cause severe slow downs on 8-bit firmwares, and very occasionally crashes on Smoothie firmware.
S3D was extremely unhelpful with this issue ( and even outright agressive at times, going as far as censoring their forums when the issue was mentionned by their users, and denying the issue exists months after they were told about it ).
It was very easy to fix on their side, but they wouldn't.
It was very hard to fix on our side, but they wouldn't help us in any way. In the end, dozens of people and thousands of hours of work were involved on the Smoothie side of things, where that was not necessary at all if S3D had helped. After all this work a fix was developped on the Smoothie side. And some months after, S3D silently fixed the issue.

Because of this, *some* of the Smoothie developers are fairly upset at S3D.

However, many people get help with S3D in the Smoothie community on a day to day basis.
Just because some people refuse to help doesn't mean you won't get any help.

Some of us also refuse to help with closed-source clones for example, but others will help, so in the end, it's just a matter of some people not being willing to spend their free time helping on things they don't want to help with. I don't think you can blame them, it's volunteer work ...

And again : *others* do help, so all is good if you take a step back ...

I wouldn't wait for the new smoothieboard. It comes up in the IRC channel fairly regularly. The board developers simply will not commit to a promise date.

There are dozens of volunteers involved in the development. I can't go see volunteers who do this on their hobby times and tell them "Hey Todd, you got to finish this by monday or I'll report you to HR" ...
So no we can't have timetables.
What I can say is it's a collosal project, it's going very well, a lot of work is being done, and there is stuff happening all the time.
It's going to be awesome

It probably doesn't help that there will be, as I understand it, different versions.

That's not a problem. What's causing the most delays right now is simply how collosal in scope the project is

Cheers all

[adamfilip]

Also checkout the DuetWifi very comparible to the Smoothieboard/Ware