Hack the planet! Subvert big agriculture! Plant an apple tree!

Too soon.

Certainly longer, at least by a few years.

Outside of the 1gb RAM, dual core, and dedicated bus, BeagleBone Black is your board. Unfortunately the new revision have more eMMC and not more RAM for the money.

As for the bus, the manufacturer has to decide between bringing everything out on high density connectors that are useless for hobbyists, or be selective and use common .1" pitch box headers. BB/BBB, Arduino, and RasPi all owe some of their popularity to that accessibility. The BBB has some limitations imposed by the peripheral choice, though eMMC and HDMI can be disabled to get access to the full 16 bit GPMC bus. I've used this on a project before and had a NAND cape and FPGA hanging off it with a bunch of pins left over for peripherals.

What we would both probably like is a BeagleBone like board with the Freescale I.MX6 quad, like the Udoo without the Arduino or a cost reduced Novena.

More likely that it costs extra to do FCC part 15 certification testing for additional communications modes. This seemed to have been the case on the Nook Color, which had a chipset that could do WiFi and Bluetooth but didn't have Bluetooth support in the OS.

FTFY

Raspberry.

Can it write "CHA"?

The potato people. GP meant to type ATMOS.

Now that I think about it, that's true, there is no hardware flow control for RepRap firmware. Sorry, forgot about that. Every command is responded to with "ok" if it's been accepted into the buffer. If there's no room, the "ok" is delayed until the buffer has space. So maybe "copy file com1:" might not work well, but a very simple expect script could do the job.

Some firmware lets you use the nonstandard 250000 baud rate. On Linux, 250000 is supported by newer kernels but requires some libraries be updated (pyserial for Pronterface and Octoprint). The reason that's chosen is because it divides down with no clock error to the CPU clocks used on some of the AVRs used for RepRaps.

This isn't a problem if you use 115200.

Is that what you were thinking of?

Wouldn't they be unspoolers?

Once I lost a 7 hour 3D print job because Win7 decided that it was ok to reboot to install patches if I haven't been in front of the computer for 15 minutes. That was the end of my brief reunion with Windows on my personal machines.

You can throw any bitmap at any color laser printer, and it should print it.

Take any 3D model and send it to a 3D printer and you'll likely get a blob of goo if the toolchain doesn't choke on the model first.

Mapping a 2D image to a 2D surface is easy. Taking an arbitrary mesh and turning it into instructions to manufacture a mechanically sound object is hard.

And here is how to send a file to a 3D printer that speaks gcode:

C:\> mode com1: baud=115200
C:\> copy foo.gcode com1