On 07/20/2017 07:19 AM, Les Newell wrote:
From what I research I have done the Raspberry is more
than a little problematic. The Beagle Bone seems to be the
board of choice for Machinekit. I looked into this and
came to the conclusion it is too much work for no real
gain. You can get small Intel based boxes pretty cheap
these days. I/O tends to be limited but you can use a Mesa
Ethernet based I/O board. Many come with a mini PCIe slot
and you can get mini PCIe to PCIe or PCI adapters quite
easily. For instance on my lathe I use one of these
adapters to run an old 5i20 PCI card.
One big advantage of the Beagle Bone is it has the PRU
processors (a pair of 200 MHz 32-bit microcontrollers with
shared memory to the ARM CPU). Charles Steinkuehler has
written a program for these that implement encoder counters,
step generators and PWM generators. The configuration of
these can be done through Hal commands. He was aiming it
mostly at 3D printers, but it is pretty flexible. I make
the CRAMPS board (designed by Charles) that mounts up to 6
Pololu-style stepper drivers plus 6 PWM outputs, temp sensor
inputs and limit switch inputs right on top of the Beagle
Bone board. it is about 3" square. So, the entire system
fits in the palm of your hand. You can ssh -X into it, or
hook up a screen via XDMI. Or use USB to network in.
So, these PRUs act sort of like super-good software
stepping, almost as good as a hardware step generator.
Jon
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