EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

I actually prefered this post article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.emc.devel/7374

It made me think about the real problem of open source, which is that often those that are enthusiastic do not have the skill or understanding to do a good job and will hack into a codebase and ruin things :lol:

I actually think I probably have enough understanding to realise that I am going to do a rather crap job of this, but I am hacking on it as a hobby for fun, but also in the hope that someone with the right skills might see there is some interest in using new RT kernels and decide to show how it should be done properly.

I actually did a degree in computer engineering, but that was a long time ago and I spent most of my time getting stoned at college, and never got a job in the computing industry.

I think linuxcnc is a sort of infrastructure project for machine control and needs some real planning by experts to be worthwhile, but that said I think and hope that ideas and lessons can be gained from people attempting to hack things and see what happens.

I finally felt well enough to get back to hacking on the rpi but unfortunately I destroyed my system last night, after messing around with over clocking something trashed my SD card.

As I am going to have to start again, I decided I will try and make an autobuild script so I can quickly get back to a working system if the filesystem is trashed again.

Most of my code is backed up but there is maybe a little lost so it may take some time to get working, I will start this evening and hope to post the scripts at the end of the weekend, if anyone is interested in testing please let me know as I would like to know if the build scripts will work okay for others.

I am not sure if I will have enough time to get a full system setup but will see how it goes, as I am building everything on the rpi kernel build is an overnight compile job and linuxcnc probably takes 5 hours to compile.

I may also get enough time to show the circuits for the parallel port interface that I made, if anyone lets me know that they are actually interested enough to bother soldering one together.

Suggested hardware to compile is : rpi, 8Gb SD card, a powered usb hd for swapspace.

I have uploaded all the development drivers, machine config examples and hardware datasheets, plus the scripts I use to grab the kernel source and patches for RT, and packages and source to compile the RT version of linuxcnc for the raspberry pi.

If anyone wants a copy its available at : www.soundproofingforum.co.uk/halitosis/rpi_linuxcnc.tgz

File size is about 32Mb, but you have to download 90Mb of update packages for raspbian, 30Mb of git source checkout for linuxcnc, and 100Mb of kernel source.

If you are good you should be able to compile and run the system with an hour or so of reading and leave the raspberry pi on over night to compile new kernel and linuxcnc RT_PREEMPT.

I have done some brief tests on the RT system and it needs a lot of tuning of ini file for base period and other params, but the RT version is definitly much better than the sim mode compile (though still slow and crap compared to an x86 version).

I think the i2c driver also needs some work though as I guess the i2c transmit speed maybe causing some problems.

I still need to make some docs about how to wire the i2c io expander though most people should be able to do that from the datasheet

I hope there are some people that can help and give feedback.

mungkie wrote:

I have uploaded all the development drivers, machine config examples and hardware datasheets, plus the scripts I use to grab the kernel source and patches for RT, and packages and source to compile the RT version of linuxcnc for the raspberry pi.

If anyone wants a copy its available at : www.soundproofingforum.co.uk/halitosis/rpi_linuxcnc.tgz

wow - thanks! exactly what I was looking for!

- Michael

mungkie,

there seems to be something wrong with the link you posted - could you check?

- Michael

I hope this goes through, I'm getting many 502 errors for one reason.

In any event what do you mean runs like crap? Is that general slowness or something specific to LinuxCNC? I've been following this thread for awhile now, you have made significant progress.