DIY ideas for Raspberry Pi?

I'd love to. Now how do I explain this to friends who are being laid off from our local university, where they were already doing just that as their full-time job? This "rework ICT" initiative sounds great at first, except that it also seems to be being used as an excuse to dump its teaching from state-funded schools and onto the voluntary sector.

Great big "Start" tooltip appears when you hover it.

that is a first class idea...

can it control stepper motors directly tho?

and detect optical limit switches?

This is happening all over the place. It's called the "Big Society".

I thought that was the memory option that it had.

If you can't add it any other way, then you can't add the cost of doing so to the purchase price, can you?

so I didn't neeed to.

tim

So you don't have one TV per house occupant so that everyone can watch their own choice? (Wars have started for less)

tim

A project called GRBBL already does this on the Arduino, although the Arduino is creaking under the load and isn't running a user interface at the same time.

For CNC mills (less so for lasers) the steppers are controlled by a stepper drive module, like a Gecko. These take a simple control interface of "num steps / direction" and also a configurable setup for fastest speed, acceleration rates and current limits. This makes the control task simpler, as the controller doesn't need to generate the motor pulses. It also allows the rather significant (for mills anyway) feature of current and maybe temperature control of the motors. You can't do this from a single controller as there just isn't enough IO to go round. You could of course build your own stepper controllers, with their own embedded controllers, but the commercial ones are cheap enough.