Sparkfun announced today that they are releasing their own version of the Shapeoko.
https://www.sparkfun.com/stepoko
What is interesting is that they have made their own board, SparkFun Stepoko - ROB-13155 - SparkFun Electronics , which is a Uno and gshield mated together. It has screw connectors for all limit switches 
The board is a nice idea, but kinda puts all your eggs in one basket. I like the separation because if something blows it’s a lot easy to detect and alot cheaper to replace.
Very cool.
On the flip side, how many people have had trouble with getting all the pins lined up between the uno and gshield ? I already had an uno, so I just bought a gshield and mounted it all in an old PC case. Yes you’re right, but the main risk would be a blown driver, and that doesn’t seem to be a huge problem. There are posts about people replacing gshields or uno’s, but how many of them were caused by incorrectly mating in the first place.
What I am somewhat surprised about is the cost of the board. I have multiple of Sparkfun’s Uno clones, the redboard, which is a $20 board , SparkFun RedBoard - Programmed with Arduino - DEV-13975 - SparkFun Electronics , and one half of this. I’ve yet to swap out the Uno for a Redboard, but will probably give it a shot this weekend. So $129 for what is essentially a gshield clone is a lot of money.
The red is sexy…
I am also perplexed by this price point. I would think with all the in house assembly happening at sparkfun and the mating of the two boards these would be cheaper to produce.
Could someone familiar w/ electronics components look over the source / parts list and work up a price list?
I suspect that there are some expensive parts for driving the NEMA23 motors which add up to the bulk of the expense.
I didn’t run the whole board, but the gshield uses a chip which is $1 more expensive from Mouser.com in single quantities, $3.65 to $4.66 to $0.40 more expensive at qty 2000.
There is labour to do the through hole stuff, which they are going away from doing on boards. $100 would be where I would have thought the board would have come in honestly.
