The Beagle Bones are so cheap, that we shouldn't be worrying about how many pins we can drive. Just connect a few together using etherCAT or real time ethernet, or whatever the thing supported by the hardware is called.
As far as I'm concerned, the problem of no parallel port has been solved with these devices and an ethernet. Sure we need a driver, but that isn't rocket science. We do have some significant open questions for the next few decades though. -- How will are functionality be divided among hardware units? -- How many (and what) platforms will we support? -- How can we distribute HAL (and should we) among multiple components? We KNOW we will lose the parallel port. We know that PCs will become less deterministic when it comes to real-time operation. (Modern office machines MUST play games with their clock speed to use power efficiently.) -- Does our future architecture include a PC? Ken On 4/23/2013 11:03 AM, Charles Steinkuehler wrote: > On 4/22/2013 11:40 AM, Matt Shaver wrote: >> On Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:30:23 +0200 >> Michael Haberler <mai...@mah.priv.at> wrote: >> >>> We'll have a ready-to-go SD card image with xenomai, all prerequisite >>> packages and linuxcnc installed in a week or two; that will include >>> Charles' PRU stepgen and Sergey's/GP Orcullo's emcweb, and should >>> reduce the guru requirements to get things going >> So, I'm ordering a new Beagle Bone Black this morning & I was wondering >> what you guys are doing for a field I/O interface for this computer. Is >> there a cape I should get? Or are we at the perfboard and wire-wrap >> wire stage? :) > The BeBoPr board is available now and has support for both the Pololu > drivers common in the 3D printer world and a header to drive out-board > stepper drivers with a more "oomph". From the BeBoPr maunal: > > J5 – all stepper signals are present on this connector. It connects > directly to the 15 pin sub-D connector of a TB6560-4V5 3A stepper > driver board sold on e-Bay. > > There's also the Replicape, but AFAIK it's on-board stepper driver only > (Pololu class, but using TI driver chips). > > There's nothing I'm aware of yet that works for analog servos, but it > should be possible, at least for a few channels (the CPU has 3 hardware > encoder inputs, and the PRU could support more in "software" at lower > pulse rates). > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_apr _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
