Welcome to Smoothie
Smoothie is a brain for computer-controlled fabrication machines.
It executes lists of movements and tool actions to make things.
It is made by a community.
Quick Links
- Click here to see the documentation
- Click here to see the source code
- Click here to engage the community
- Click here to get a board
In a Nutshell
Powerful
Designed to run on 32 bit hardware in an age of 8-bit boards, with a lot of effort put into optimisation, and moving forward to more powerful platforms as they appear.
Does its job faster, more correctly, and of course smoothly.
When Smoothie was designed originally, all Open-Hardware CNC controllers were running on the awesome Arduino, which is 8-bit.
While this platform led to some incredible progress, like pretty much launching the Reprap project, it was coming to its limits, adding features was difficult, there were some serious technical shortcomings and limitations.
Smoothie was created to take advantage of the more powerful 32-bit microcontrollers available at the time, to add more features, do things more correctly and faster, and be able to experiment again.
Today, 32bit controllers are getting more common, and Smoothie is moving towards using even more powerful chips, to keep exploring and innovating.
Smoothieboard v1 runs on a LPC1769 Cortex-M3 32bit ARM chip, clocking 120Mhz, with 64kB RAM and 512kB flash.
The firmware is the result of years of hard work making sure we use as much of the additional power as we can, and is improved in nearly every way possible in terms of performance and features, compared to code running on older platforms.
Open Source
Open-Source firmware running on Open-Hardware boards, written and designed by the community, for the community.
Contributors welcome!
Everything Smoothie-related, from the code, to the hardware design files, to the documentation, is fully Open-Source.
The firmware is licensed under the GPL v3 license and can be found at https://github.com/Smoothieware/Smoothieware
The hardware files for the Smoothieboard are licensed under the CERN OHL v.1.2 and can be found at https://github.com/Smoothieware/Smoothieboard
All of the documentation on this wiki is user-produced, and licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.
We strongly believe in the idea of Open-Source and Open-Hardware, and see every day how much awesomer sharing everything makes a project.
Universal
Brings different communities together to create a larger project: supports laser cutting, 3D printing and CNC milling, instead of specializing on one job.
Means more community, more contributors, more features, more eyes on the code, more documentation and more awesomeness.
Contrary to more specialized platforms, the goal with Smoothie is to be useful on as many machine types as possible, within the general world of digital fabrication.
The main 3 machines supported currently, are laser cutters, 3D printers and CNC mills, and each has a step by step guide:
Smoothie Guides
Choose the guide that matches your machine type:
Other Guides
There is also a Pick and Place guide available.
For general information, see the main documentation.
Other machines machine types are possible, like vinyl cutters, and more machines are planned, like lathes, plasma cutters and 4/5-axis CNC mills.
In order to achieve this multi-usefulness, the firmware is built in a modular fashion: everything is separated, and the motion control code for example, is independent from the code that does things like controlling lasers, or extruders.
This means you can add a new tool, or use for the firmware, with a limited amount of complexity involved.
And it also means that if the laser people make the motion control code better, the 3D printer people profit from the change, which wouldn’t be the case if each community had their separate monolithic firmwares.
Additional Features
Feature Rich
Using superior hardware to pioneer features that make your life easier, allow for new digital fabrication techniques, or make the current ones more powerful.
Enjoy cutting-edge functionality and see more added all the time.
Documented
The most complete and beginner-friendly documentation around.
Enjoy machine-specific step by step general guides, as well as in-depth documentation of each feature.
Modular
Highly modular code allows for an easier contributor experience, better long-term codebase sanity, and also enjoy a very versatile system that makes it easy to do unusual and innovative things, often without even having to code anything.
Easy
Experience painless configuration simply by editing a file, live tuning of parameters, all documented in detail.
Even doing new and unusual things is made easier.
And if anything goes wrong, find a very active community to help.
Community Driven
Built by the community, for the community.
A vibrant ecosystem of contributors, users, and enthusiasts working together to make Smoothie better every day.
Future Friendly
Designed with extensibility in mind, ready to adapt to new technologies and use cases as they emerge.
Always evolving, always improving.