On 10/25/2016 05:10 PM, Kirk Wallace wrote: > the hardware inside is radio hardware, so the main board would be wasted on > a machine controller
A lot of people like to listen to music or talk radio in the shop. Maybe that radio hardware is not a waste after all. :-) I need a dual core controller so I can devote one processor to being a realtime machining controller while the other streams YouTube machining videos. :-) I've been following the discussion on this list describing a small inexpensive FPGA CNC machine interface board in conjunction with a tiny and inexpensive controller board like the Raspberry Pi. That could be a very inexpensive solution, but it could also be a very compact, low power, easy to install and robust solution. What I'd really like to see is a controller in the class of the Raspberry Pi with a stack-on daughter board for the FPGA motion control and general purpose I/O. The daughter board would have screw terminals but they could be snapped off in banks to swap or service the daughter board or the underlying controller. Processors are now sufficiently low power that keeping a stack like this cool shouldn't be a problem. This would open up a lot of potential for integrated CNC machines, including desktop machines. I've always felt that the Polulu stepper drivers were a bit too delicate, even for hobby based 3D printers. Maybe offer four axis daughter boards, with one optimized for stepper motors and another for servo motors? There could be enough I/O that there would be no need to configure unused motion control axes as general purpose I/O. If you didn't need those features, simply ignore them. That would greatly reduce the setup complexity to a nearly plug-and-play LinuxCNC solution. Standards are good! The PC104 format promised this sort of hardware stacking modularity but it's fallen out of favor lately as we've flocked to the Arduino, BeagleBone, and Raspberry Pi. BTW - I was never much of a video gamer and haven't played a video game in probably 30 years, but I'm thinking of building a classic 1980's era video game console using a Raspberry Pi, mostly for the geeky fun of it... like I need another project. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Command Line: Reinvented for Modern Developers Did the resurgence of CLI tooling catch you by surprise? Reconnect with the command line and become more productive. Learn the new .NET and ASP.NET CLI. Get your free copy! http://sdm.link/telerik _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
