DigiX - The Ultimate Arduino Compatible Development Board

I am new to the reprap community, I have been researching building one for a little while now and have been spending some time chatting on IRC for ideas. I came across a kickstarter project that some of you may be interested in. I want to contribute, but I am not currently knowledgeable enough to be able to work the firmware, shield/stepper driver, and other issues associated with untested technology. I particularly like the WiFi embedded on the board and some of the extras built in, but maybe its overkill for a reprap? I want to pose it to the community and see what discussion this board brings up, if a few others commit to buying and take the lead on pioneering a setup for this board I would like to follow along, otherwise I will probably chalk it up to something cool that costs more than I need to spend and move on with a cheaper solution .

DigiX

As I hoped, the Arduino Due is opening a bunch of ARM based boards. DigiX at $59 isn't bad compared to Due, but there is also Taijiuino [www.elechouse.com] which is $36. It would have been great if the Due had onboard Ethernet, the Taiji has ethernet on an adaptor but prevents shields being plugged in.

The new ARM SOCs coming out of China are pretty amazing, driving the cost down and features up. There will be a 1GHz board for $40 soon, if not already. Unfortunately for various reasons it takes the software a while catch up.

One thing interesting to note is that the people behind the DigiX are also making a 3.3v to 5v level shifting shield, which could mean that people with an existing RAMPS setup could move straight to using a Due-like piece of hardware (eg: DigiX, Arduino Due or an Udoo) without needing to buy a new 3.3v variant of the RAMPS.

Whether it will 100% work with a RAMPS shield is still to be determined, Mainly, how well does the 5V-3.3V level shifting work for analog inputs like the thermistors. This is something that I haven't seen details on for the level shifting shield thgat DigiX are working on.

Yeah, a universal and cheap level shifter is a Holy Grail, but I think that is hard to do. For general digital I/O it should work fine, more tricky stuff like I2C and analog may be hard to convert reliably, and for low cost.

If you add the fact that pin functions move about between processors, in theory you might need to be able to map every pin as straight through, level conversion with pullup, level w/o pullup, analog in, analog out... gets complicated. There is regular discussion on the topic on the Arduino Due forum, and there is really no universal low cost answer.

Offsetting the pins so they can use through hole connectors works for Uno, but not for Mega. I have only seen mention of Uno shields, which I guess the majority of shields are, I am not sure we will see a similar converter board for Mega, since it is more expensive to do and a smaller market.

The RAMPS converter I and others have been working on is application specific, so can be simplified, but even there it is perhaps not very cost-effective.