Smoothieware VS DWC-CNC

I originally wrote Teacup because I was horrified at numerous aspects of the state of other 3d printer firmware codebases available, but after a few years I became far more interested in Smoothie and officially relinquished leadership of Teacup to Traumflug who'd been doing far more work on it than me at the time

Also, Windows' USB stack is a complete dumpster fire - in Linux your thing just needs to say "hi I've got camera interfaces" in the device descriptor and you're mostly good to go, but Windows needs actual driver development, or at least a magic text file to tell it to use its preinstalled drivers.

Fwiw I wrote the runtime descriptor construction code for smoothie which is how I know it's possible - and yet even after a decade, I don't see any other firmware libraries with similar descriptor construction mechanisms which is sad.

Smoothie has a dynamic device descriptor, and adding an extra serial port via config setting is a fairly reliable way to bluescreen windows.

There's a few forum threads around (eg this one regarding the Teensy arduino core), but I haven't seen any firmware stacks with the dynamic USB descriptor initialization and endpoint allocation you'd need for runtime custom USB function sets other than the one I wrote for Smoothie a decade ago.

PS: USB in a nutshell is a great read if you're planning to work with USB firmware stacks - was super helpful when I was massaging Smoothie's USB stack

Bizarrely however, you need a magic text file to convince windows to actually use it with a particular device - despite the fact that USB was specifically designed for this to be entirely unnecessary as devices must describe themselves to the host on connect and there are many standardized interface patterns.

I've been thinking of creating a 3D printer to print buildings or maybe a CNC machine for milling lumber out of these trees. I've got an upper-end Smoothieboard so I could do that.

I've been fairly happy with Smoothieware http://smoothieware.org

I don’t think there’s many people cutting steel. Lots are taking decent bites out of aluminum though. I don’t know of anyone who’s running a Duet3 board, but there’s a RepRapFirmware channel on the PrintNC discord I did find this though! https://github.com/Duet3D/DWC-CNC/releases So it looks like they’ve sorted CNC functionality in DWC for you.