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If I wasn't replying, I'd give you a +1 for (B). Compact or not, it's a huge pain in the ass to have a bunch of those patch cables, not just for USB A but for the USB power and the HDMI as well. With points to soldier to, it'd be easy to cut cables to fit.

I created my own USB cables by buying USB connectors on Adafruit, leaving off al the plastic crap and soldering them myself using thin copper wire. That cuts the amount of space you need for the connector down from something like 4-5 cm down to 1 cm. However, those USB connectors are a bitch to solder, especially mini and micro USB. I know you can order customised raspberries but for small projects that's not practical. if you have 20 pre production prototypes to assemble for user testing then it's impractical to solder so many cables. Soldering 90 degree pins into the USB connector house on the PCB and connecting them with female pin connectors like the ones on the page in the below link is much easier. https://buildyourcnc.com/Item/...

http://buildyourcnc.com/

There's already other people working on a pick-and-place machine. Granted the future goals of Board Forge are greater, but combining a multi-head CNC mill with a pick-and-place machine is not a new idea.

There's a lot of other machines out there. On the CNC side there's the Mantis, a small desktop-sized milling machine for making circuit boards but it can also cut foam, wax, chocolate, etc. Most people seem to drive their Mantis with motors and electronics made for RepRap printers.

There's even a milling machine made out of standard LEGO parts (aside from the milling bit). It can mill 3D shapes into floral foam.

Need a stronger, faster mill? Build Your Own CNC Router has a lot of information, so does CNCzone.com.

Small, very low-cost CNC for milled circuit boards:
http://makeyourbot.org/mantis9-1

3D printer:
http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

Desktop-sized to shop-sized CNC mills:
http://www.buildyourcnc.com/

Who said you can't make money from open hardware? Of course you can, just like with open source you need to focus on the scarcities. The article itself talks about Kickstarter -- which is money in the bank before you even have a proper product to sell! Think about that, financially it doesn't get any better than that for inventors (unless they are working for a company, in which case they still won't own the invention at the end).

And inventors can keep on making money off their open work. Perhaps they aren't selling the design, but they can still sell people the convenience of buying the appropriate parts to build the device. For example: http://buildyourcnc.com/default.aspx

Don't just get a CNC mill. Build one yourself.

Or Build your own CNC machine.

Sure he's selling kits for big bucks now, but check-out steps 1 through 36 on the left-hand side of his home page to see how he built his first CNC machine for some handy tips.

It's easy enough to build a crap CNC mill, but not very useful. This one is made of wood, and the bridge isn't even cross-braced. It's not going to be stiff enough to do decent work. Just because the cutting tool is a Dremel tool doesn't mean you can skip on rigidity. Dremel used to make a drill-press rig for their tools, and it wobbled so much it was useless. And that was just drilling. In milling, you have side loads.

Little CNC mills have been around for years. Roland makes a nice little one. The usual little mill is a Sherline, and those can be equipped for CNC, although it's a retrofit. A Sherline can mill aluminum and mild steel. The MicroLux, at $499, is about as low as it gets in milling machines that can cut metal. That's not a CNC machine, but retrofits are possible.

These guys aren't the first to propose building a toy CNC mill. The Art Institute of Chicago has a little wooden CNC mill. And unlike these guys, who are peddling vaporware, the Art Institute machine exists. The Art Institute machine can be made from flat stock with a laser cutter. It can't mill hard materials, but if you're just making models of designs to look at, you can use various easy-to-mill foams, plastics, and waxes. A slightly bigger wood CNC machine is at Build Your CNC. Those are all proven designs.

Hype about CNC milling seems to be highest among people who've never used a milling machine. CNC mills are great devices, but they're not magic. The smaller machines don't cut very fast, the cutting tools are expensive, the process is messy (if you're cutting metal, you're constantly pouring coolant on the cutter, and in high-speed machines, the coolant flow is garden-hose sized), and for complex objects, clamping the work out of the way of the cutter is a hassle.

If you want to play with CNC on line, download the demo version of VCarve, which is a CAD/CAM design tool for 3-axis milling machines. VCarve will give you a sense of what you can and can't do with a 3-axis mill. VCarve can simulate the cutting process in 3D and show you what the finished part will look like. There's a really impressive solid modeling engine inside that program. VCarve (the pay version) will output the files to drive a CNC mill to make the part.

At the high end of CNC, there are 5-axis machines with tool changers, and software that can use all those features to full advantage. Watch this demo of Hypermill driving a Daishin 5-axis mill. The software package alone for that costs $20,000. The software figures out which tools to use in what order, and how much clearance is required to get the cutting head near the work. That's approaching the "replicator" level of CNC.

Now what would be interesting is to put a Dremel tool on a multi-axis robot arm, with force feedback from servomotors and Hypermill-like smarts. That would allow real 3D work, not just top-down 3-axis work. Most of the dumb 3-axis machines use steppers, so they don't know how much load is on the structure, and can't compensate for deflections under load. With servomotors, the software could compensate for some lack of rigidity.