This would be an amazing boon to hobbyist woodworkers (and i hope that's what they mean by "consumer version").
A large amount of time routing is spent making jigs or patterns templates or transferring measurements or ...
Even simple things like dado grooves require clamps and a straightedge.<p>Given the right price, almost every woodworker on the planet would likely buy this.<p>They mention the precision is 0.009" average error, which is good enough for woodworking, but not say, metalworking, or even any kind of precision plastic parts.<p>They also mention "digital automation" in general, which this wouldn't replace. Cabinet shops/etc use CNC machines not just because they are accurate, repeatable, etc, but because they do not require humans to baby them.
While I think this idea is awesome, it solves a <i>common</i> problem in a unique and creative way, I sadly cannot watch the video: "Unfortunately, this EMI-music-content is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights."<p>Oh my, one more video I cannot watch just because I am german and one more day of my life ruined by them :(
A neat application, indeed - but there is definitely something to find flaw with: it is purported to provide the ability to route arbitrarily large pieces at a very low cost. However, a human operator is not like a gantry-style CNC router, they cannot simply "fly" over the work area. Typically, must operate the router in a "push and pull" fashion to maintain control. A human would become weary very quickly if you put them in a harness over a 50-ft piece of material and forced them to push and pull with their arms hanging below them. Finding motors with enough torque, but not so much to put the human in danger (you wouldn't want a software flaw to push the router in a dangerous direction without the operator being able to override it with their own physical strength) will limit what bits and materials the process can be used on. Granted, I'm fairly certain few are expecting to CNC route metallic materials by hand. =)<p>Overall a cool new application - I find the display on the screen one of the best features, and, in fact, I'd kill to have something like that -without- the motor correction. One could, with some work, replace the motors with encoders attached to spinning shafts, which were limited in which direction they could spin, and get rid of the tape - simply showing the user that they are following the pattern or not.
This is awesome! But in this case, instead of introducing the human element, wouldn't it be (relatively) easy to make the entire apparatus self-driving and programmable? As in, mount this thing on a Roomba-like robot and give it a coarse driving path?
Genius - even though the router is made by Dewalt, I hope it's patent protected and licensed by MIT so we can start seeing this in Home Depot / Lowes without one company owning the rights.