Not sure what the path is for innovation of the later while maintaining the essence of the former. The current design has been distilled into something that just works really well and can be a sellable product.
Its risky and costly for a small business to perform the R&D necessary to innovate beyond the current design and its much safer to just keep the current design and make incremental improvements along the way. Its hard enough trying to develop a workable business model based on an open source design let alone try and make major changes to the very design they are building that model around. The major revisions have been to the software because its a natural tendency to develop software solutions for hardware problems. Granted thats where a lot of changes needed to be made but hardware wise I don’t know how to make step change improvements without moving beyond the criteria outlined by @dlang. The four motor concept is the next logical step but I dont see the vendors attempting it as it would required R&D time and money. Both of which I dont think they want to expend. Especially when there is the potential for a whole community of people to take that task for them, for free.
I’m leaning towards bogus copy, looks like they copied at least part of this forum a couple years ago (October 2021), and it’s likely they copied a number of user IDs as well. Since then there’s only been a handful of posts, and the few active users there seem to have an attitude.
I think the motor drive with the encoder feedback DC motors makes it unique among DIY units. I’d keep that aspect and the tilted frame for space, but make it into a lowerider type of setup and nix the sled riding on the surface. the sled keeps getting hung up on stuff or scratching the surface.
They are a special kinda scum over there… They continue to slowly lift info from all the various existing locations, without backlinks. “Maslow User @Dag83” is their latest victim, but at least they credited the user name /s
eh, scum is pretty harsh but it would be nice to hear a good reason why they thought creating a clone (layout color scheme, etc) of the official forum was necessary in the first place. Added to it the need to lift posts from the official forum.
Probably never going to hear one though and ultimately, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Somebody somewhere got a hair across their tucus and decided that this was their solution to their problem.
Scum because the duplicate content without a backlink to the original results in google seeing BOTH sites as less relevant, making it harder for new users to find ANY of the forums or help articles
I’m not going to put words in @bar’s mouth but I think the definition of a Maslow is based more on what the machine does than the actual mechanics of it. The intent of the Maslow was to put large format, low cost CNC in the hands of makers. Doing so using the method that Bar and others came up with was a way of doing that. Is it the only way? Not sure. Vertical is nice for a space savings but using gravity to our advantage was a great way to cut costs. Leaving out the gantry was another good cost reduction strategy. Only needing two DC motors and not steppers or servos was yet another.
The Cubiio X uses concepts similar to Maslow but:
It’s horizontal, not vertical.
It’s working area is 4’x4’ or 2’x6’. Not small but not large either.
It uses two motors and cables to position a sled that caries the Z-Axis so in that respect it’s Maslow-ish.
The Cubiio X kickstarter has a backer price of $1250.00 USD with a future retail price of $1900.00 USD. It is very intriguing in concept. Price wise though it’s closer to a Shaper origin or a lower end traditional gantry machine. I think this is where it deviates from what a Maslow is. I would not consider the Cubiio X to be a large format, low cost CNC machine. The Maslow we have now could have evolved beyond what it is but maintaining or even reducing cost was always a factor. If Bar had set a cost point of $1900 for the original Malsow and incorporated higher end hardwware and design it would have been a far better machine, but it wouldn’t have met the goal of low cost either.
TLDR, cost should be considered as much as the design.
That has a lot of overlap with the direction Bar has been aiming. I wonder if
they actually have it working or just think they do. (what happens if one of the
4 endpoints is out of position just a little bit)
unfortunantly, at that price, they are unlikely to share their code. But if it
does work, it’s proof that the 4 motor design is possible
But since they developed it completely independently, I think it would be
presuming to call it part of the maslow family.
Woah @Dag83 thanks for pointing that out to me! I hadn’t seen that. It’s VERY similar to what I’ve been working on. The video is a bit cheesy and light on technical details so I wonder if they’ve really got it all worked out. I’m shooting for keeping the 4x8 work space and the $350 price tag, but other than that it’s almost exactly the same
The only US patent activity I see for the company, Muherz, are two patents for a laser engraver/cutter (US-10688598-B2 and US-20190030647-A1), completely different from the Maslow4.
