FOSS marlin PP - for the good; what do you think?

Mostly Printed CNC - MPCNC Advice
1

Hi all,

as you have surely noted, I’m currently putting some effort in the achievement of free and open source solutions for the mpcnc for everybody (not only the cracks) by a series of (hopefully) easy to follow tutorials.

So far, we have grbl based solutions from zero to milled part.

However, not everybody uses ramps, not everybody wants to flash grbl firmware. So the missing piece which would allow everybody to use foss freeCAD togeter with their already in use controller & frontend would be to establish a preprocessor for FreeCAD spiting out marlin-mpcnc gcodes.

 

As this will make some work (although its more or less clear what needs to be done), and I’m peronally quite happy with grbl and bCNC, I would do this ONLY under the following conditions (for the good) - (please give some feedback what you think of it):

There have been several people stating they would be willing to pay if someone would establish a foss alternative to estlcam. I wouldn’t start it for personal enrichment, but for the good as follows:

  • Ryan tells us how much we need to invest for him to provide an mpcnc for an educational project (e.g. at a school), let say X$
  • There will be someone or even a set of people who promise (provided the parts by Ryan) to build and put into operation at that location, give some introduction to the people there.
  • Several users donate a few $ such that Ryan get X$ for the machine parts.
  • The project beneficiaries promise to a) test the new pp to achieve some confidence that everything works as intended b) take over the extension and updating of the FreeCAD mpcnc-marlin pp
Why do I think this is a good idea:
  • we'll establish a foss toolchain based on the great effort already put into marlin firmwar adaption for all the different V1engineering machines
  • we'll establish some long term responsibles for the pp without putting more work load upon Ryan et.al.
Please comment this!

If you think this is a good idea, we can find the right value of $X etc. I could start implementing the basic pp.

 

 

2

I am excited about the first half, and I suggest you add some sort of donation link so people can show there appreciation for your work.

 

The second half I am not clear about. If anyone that works on this does not have a machine, we could very easily set up time on mine if they are local. If you have a specific place in mind that wants/needs an MPCNC we can try to work something out depending on what parts they might already have.

3

I don’t have a project in mind here, locally. I was thinking that having it over close to you would be beneficial (it would not pay off to send the stuff across the ocean I guess).

I thought I heard of people having such projects already, but might mix this up with another ‘work stream’ of mine.

Isn’t there a (possibly a retired teacher) mpcnc-user who could do that?Could also be at a college /university or in europe there are these clubs where people can just build things. They share 3d printers and other machines…

 

4

addendum:

And I was thinking it would be good to have several people having ‘skin in the game’. I feel a bit that the feedback/resonance is quite low. So just implementing for the fun of it - you know, I have more work than I can get done.

However I would be willing to invest if others would do also, just because I really like the mpcnc and the idea behind…

5

Ok, response shows it: no interest in this.

-> I’d say mpcnc-marlin-pp for freecad is dead for the moment