The Photon Elephant Launches on Kickstarter: Raspberry Pi Controlled OS

[SarahA]

The ever-growing maker community often shows a preference toward customizing their equipment, as shown by such movements as RepRap, wherein users can make their own 3D printers. Integrating software -- to slice, control movement, etc. -- is often the trickier part of the process, compared to constructing the hardware components. The Photon Elephant from Texas-based Photon Elephant LLC eliminates the need for an Arduino board, integrating linux into the printer itself and using the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins to drive the motor controllers directly. The company built an SDK so hackers and makers can customize their setup to their heart's content. The Photon Elephant has just launched on Kickstarter, where the goal is to raise $10,000 in funding by February 12th to fully launch this bundle of hardware and software which will control almost any Cartesian-based 3D printer. Check out more details about this innovative product: http://3dprint.com/37160/photon-elephant-3d-print/


Below is a photo of the Photon Elephant board:

[Mjolinor]

Hmm, it will be interesting to see if the real time kernel actually allows the pi to work well with this. I have looked into it and as far as I could tell the pi didn't have enough processing power for real time control of enough to work a printer.

[truly_bent]

Maybe not. I've been doing a little reading on the Photon Elephant blog site and found this little nugget:

Photon Elephant’s 3D printing daemon is reasonably low overhead, but depending on which tool you use, streaming video from your webcam can interfere with the print process.

The blog goes on to describe how to get the best streaming video out of the pi, which is more than i want to know for now, but the point is that that the pi has plenty of time for these shenanigans. Streaming video puts a fair load on the system.

The blog site makes for some interesting reading. They've decided, for now, to keep the printing daemon closed source, but allow plenty of access to tailor the code (your own G-code parser, plugins, and XML code) for (almost) any type of machine. Sounds like they'll be taking this beyond just 3D printers, too. Have to say, i'm gonna keep an eye on this one.