Embedded Projects GmbH, an online place for selling, buying, presenting and discussing embedded open source making projects (involving anything from Arduino to Linux to Microcontrollers of all kinds), is asking your opinion on going ahead with the construction of a particularly interesting project, as far as the 3D printing industry is concerned, that first appeared on Elektor Labs, an online community for sharing electronics projects (that also has its own magazine with a circulation of about 125,000 monthly copies).
What Embedded Projects wants to know is whether you think that there is room in the market for a 3D printer with embedded Linux controls that can easily turn into a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) milling machine. To find out it posted this video and a form in which it asks whether you would buy such a machine and how much you would be willing to pay for it. You also have the option to “beg” them not to build it, if you feel the market has already been saturated. Can this form of directly addressing the public through the web to assess demand be considered a new form of crowd sourcing, a sort of crowd-pre-sourcing?
The machine, which is also a thesis project by Manuel Liebert, comes with a Linux board and custom software (including the G-code interpreter) and its controls are based on a simple Web interface: it is fully open source and doubles as a solid 3D FDM 3D printer with a wider range of Linux based controls and a precise platinum cutter for circuit boards. … (Read more)
Source: 3DPrintingIndustry.com