Start raising money lads!

[AA™| joruss]

the thing that makes them so expensive is the industrial motor, keep in mind, that motor is used in the cnc machines, that motor moves a 1 ton axis on an cnc machine without a problem at a very high accuracy,

IIRC they use 13Nm motor, and you can get such thing for under 70 bucks
It has nominal step value of 1,8 deg (so that's 200 steps/turn) but with microstepping you can go 2/4/8/16 times precisely or more if needed (albeit no longer at nominal torque)

I can imagine the purpose of having aluminium casing (apart from "wow" factor) is to use it as a giant radiator, as stepping motors tend to heat up quite easily (although the longer shaft/more coils used you can achieve same torques with less current/heat and that's probably what also did).

So I can give them only credit for putting it together (stepper driver is pretty standard piece of electronics, probably some kind of arduino or raspberry pi underneath as well) and create software that hooks into the force feedback api.

Don't get me wrong, still I think it's a great project, but heavily overpriced IMO.