Elephant OS

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/photonelephant/photon-elephant-a-real-os-for-your-3d-printer

Used with a raspberry pi to replace the Arduino/Ramps combo. Interesting idea.

 

ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor

 

Concept is great IMO. But not sure where the proprietary part ends and the open part starts. Gcode parser and stepper control software modules look to be open source. I could not see if the hardware of the companion board is open? - but it does not look too complicated anyway

 

It is probably open. Most of the Kickstarter H/W like this has been (but I make hard assumptions). I could post a question on the kickstarter page I suppose.

I did see this:

"We have built our code to be as portable across these various linux boards as possible. The Raspberry Pi is just the starting point. The biggest task in doing the porting is getting a companion board set up with the exact right pin out to match the header on the board. That said, if any of our backers at the Preview level would like to deal with getting the pin outs to match a specific board, we can certainly supply binaries for that architecture. We will be launching a developer program in the next few months and will allow developers to request binaries for specific architectures through that as well."


So guessing it is not 'xactly open source on the code side.

 

There are a few Raspberry pi ideas to replace the Arduino/Ramps starting to appear.

http://3dprint.com/16060/raspberry-pi-3d-printer/

https://github.com/Wallacoloo/printipi/​

Maybe a proprietary software solution like the P Elephant will take off.

Also the pi has some issues in the 3D printer application eg it does not have analogue (A/D) inputs.

 

Yes, that explains the 'bridge' board they are working on/with. There are a number of decent bridge boards out there already as others pointed out.
It looks nice and if priced right could be a decent solution, but I like open better.