I'm just going to throw this idea out there. I'm probably not the first person to think of it, but the idea does seem to be fairly interesting.
I've been thinking about control panels for my Prusa as of late, and I came up with the idea of using a small Android tablet as a control interface. The tablet would serve as a USB host to the reprap electronics and have the same features of ReplicatorG or Pronterface; namely, being able to manually control the axes and temperature as well as feeding GCode to the electronics.
There's a few unique advantages to doing this: for one, you would no longer need an entire computer for hours-long prints, and the tablet would make for a near-perfect control interface. Of course, this is why
stand alone controllers exist, but this seems to be a much more elegant solution.
Also, the tablet controller could be used for slic3ing and GCode generation - the tablets will run Java and Python just the same as any computer, so porting Slic3r or Skeinforge to the android domain doesn't seem to be an insurmountable challenge.
Surely I can't be the only one who has ever thought of this idea. Does anyone know of a current project to use a tablet as a stand alone controller?
