I agree, Bruce. This would be a very nice option to have. I've thought something like this: http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7350 could be made to work, but I'm not sure the CPU is fast enough (may not have hardware floating point).
Peter should make a single board computer with FPGA and processor tailored for LinuxCNC. It might be hard to get the volumes high enough to keep the price down though. -- Ralph ________________________________________ From: Bruce Layne [linux...@thinkingdevices.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 6:19 AM To: Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) Subject: Re: [Emc-users] Mach on Linux On 10/09/2012 08:58 AM, andy pugh wrote: > That is what EMC was conceived as. The whole underlying idea was to > use cheap, off the shelf, PC hardware for machine control, rather than > use expensive dedicated hardware. Does it need to be an exclusive OR function? Can't we have both? LinuxCNC was initially conceived to directly control machine motion in realtime using a parallel port, and it does a very good job of that, but it now supports a number of commercially available I/O and motion control hardware products such as Mesa, Opto 22, etc. I love being able to pick up a cheap or free PC and use it as a machine controller, but I think it'd also be great if there was a small, low cost commercially available PC that is pretty much guaranteed to work as a LinuxCNC controller. Or maybe a couple of different flavors of supported LinuxCNC controllers. Maybe one could boot from USB for LinuxCNC installation and use flash memory instead of a hard drive for small embedded LinuxCNC applications in dirty high vibration environments. There are definitely advantages to having a known good controller solution. Some people would love to spend $150 online and cross the controller off the To Do list instead of going on a Craig's List scavenger hunt. Others are machine integrators who might build 200 new machines a year and they don't want the hassle of validating a PC for LinuxCNC only to have the PC manufacturer make an unannounced cost reduction that breaks the realtime application. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
