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dc42
Andrew, thanks for your thoughts.
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AndrewBCN
Just two posts above you argued in favor of including an Ethernet interface and now you are arguing that to save costs this same Ethernet interface should not be included in your new design?
Read the whole thread. I have always said that this board will not have Ethernet. But I posed the question, will that limit sales of the board too much, because I suspect that Ethernet will in time become a must-have feature.
And I wrote above that just the contrary has already happened: wireless is the norm nowadays for interfacing devices and has been for a few years now. Perhaps you don't recognize this because of the way you are using Duet controllers and still thinking that this is the paradigm, but it's not. Ethernet is a "must-lose" feature in 2015 and if anything will become even more so in time.
There is a discussion in another thread here in this subforum about possible alternatives to the Smoothieboard, and another thread about an Alligator board, and what I am observing is that this project, like the others, continues to rehash the very same controller/electronics design that we have had since 2007. The basic "formula" has not changed one bit, some components are upgraded and some are deleted to differentiate one design from the other and that's it. The consequence of this is that the vast majority of RepRap builders choose to use 8-bit designs, and most just go for the most affordable solution i.e. Arduino + RAMPS 1.4.
You are trying to differentiate your design from the Duet and other 32-bit controller boards by removing some functionality from the Duet board and hoping that these changes plus possible economies of scale will allow your costs to reach levels comparable to that of existing 8-bit solutions. I have expressed some doubts about the feasibility of this and I still believe that a better alternative exists by thinking outside the box.