Posts made by sychan

@dc42 I'm an unsophisticated hobbyist user and not focused on individual features, so much as general attributes:

1. Stability.
2. Usability - ABL using BLTouch, a good web GUI, good tools for monitoring printer status
3. Configurability - I had to edit header files and rebuild kernels in the 90's, but that's a 1990's workflow - hopefully it shouldn't need to be done very often in 2019
4. Safety - not interested in a long running print turning into a potential fire hazard due to poor thermal design on the controller board, shabby component specifications, or poor error handling in the software cascading into a catastrophic hardware failure.
5. Print speed and quality - I don't want processor speed and outdated algorithms to be the bottleneck in getting good prints at 100-150 mm/s print speeds.
6. Quiet - the Trinamic drivers seem to be the ticket

@dc42 It probably varies depending on the clone manufacturer. Not all of the Chinese manufacturers are in a race to the bottom - a friend of mine goes to China for Apple to handle hardware QA, and nobody seems to call Apple hardware cheap and shoddy. But then, when you want quality from Chinese sources, it isn't dirt cheap anymore, and many of the people buying stuff on AliExpress are just looking for the cheapest possible price, so they get rock bottom quality for rock bottom price.

My original question was more just idle curiousity about whether Fysetc was actually sending some money back to you guys.

The Duet WiFi is far too much hardware for my little Ender 3, a Duet Maestro is a better fit. Someone is coming out with a drop in replacement board on the Ender 3, which is basically a Smoothieboard with TMC2208s, 4 layer 2oz copper/layer PCB, properly spec'd connectors, etc... which will cost about the same as a Duet Maestro, so I've been looking at the Duet Maestro vs future Paquette Smoothieboard. The more basic decision for me is RRF vs Marlin and not Chinese clone vs authentic Duet, or Duet 2 Wifi vs Duet Maestro.

Marlin seems to have large pool of committers, big feature set and the predictably uneven quality, while the dc42 RRF seems to have a very small set of committers and less features, but a better reputation for quality. I still think it makes sense to have a way to collect donations to support ongoing development, and not depend solely on hardware sales.

This is part of the price that is paid with open source - if you open source it, it is understood that people copy/improve what is there and it moves the field ahead, but you don't get to directly monetize your code. At the same time, the dc42 fork of RRF is deeply, deeply dependent on previous people who have open sourced their work, making it easier to have built the dc42 fork of RRF in the first place. And this branch of the firmware has been forked to support Smoothieboards, and I doubt that any of the manufacturers of Smoothie, SBase or SGen boards are sending any money back to pay for further RRF development.

The monetization model of open source is that you give away the code, and hope to make money on the support. So it makes a lot of sense to get a payment system in place for people who want to donate. Klipper has a Patreon donation setup, it would make sense for RRF to do the same

@fma Is there a donation Patreon or PayPal address? I looked around and didn't see one.

That's too bad. The Fysetc clones seem to be of good quality, and I was considering them as an option if they contributed back to ongoing support and development. Thanks for making it clear how things really are.

I saw that that Fysetc advertises donating a portion of the purchase price of their Duet Maestro clone back to the developers of the firmware and board:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Latest-Version-Cloned-Duet-2-Maestro-Advanced-32bit-Motherboard-For-3D-Printer-CNC-Machine/32947253015.html
"A portion of your purchase goes directly back to the developers of the Duet3D boards, and support for the development of RepRapFirmware (RRF), which has the longest legacy of any open 3D printer control board"

Is that true?