The Replicape, winner of the BeagleBone cape design contest, is now available for purchase from Thing-Printer. Congrats to Elias for his cape contest win, and especially for having the follow-through to get the product designed and built!
The Replicape looks like a good board to use for 3D printing, but won't immediately work with the LinuxCNC/MachineKit images currently available. SPI and I2C setup is required, which means some coding is needed to get everything working properly. I have a board ordered, and I am currently reworking the PRU code (to make pin numbering hopefully understandable). I hope to add Replicape support to the next release of my images, but if you're willing to try and tackle any of the SPI or I2C configuration tasks, please let me know. The setup routines can probably be done as user-mode HAL modules written in Python, so it shouldn't be too hard (unless you're like me, and grok assembly language better than things like Python and Ruby!).
Don't forget there is an ever-growing list of capes to do CNC and 3D printing with the BeagleBone. Choice is a good thing, and I'm excited the Replicape is finally shipping, adding another great choice to the list of available boards. I can't wait until mine arrives!
