Remora - ethernet NVEM / EC300 / EC500 cnc board

sensille wrote:

Sorry to chime in here, I just found the NVMPG mentioned here. It looks like a nice affordable controller to me, but unfortunately I'm unable to find information about the serial comm protocol. Do you have any documentation on that?

Yes, I reversed engineered it. See this post

forum.linuxcnc.org/18-computer/44828-rem...oard?start=30#233498

and the attachment on the post is an Excel simulator.

Very nice, great work!

I made a video of the EC300 PCB. Not sure if EC500 and EC300 share the same processor. 



 

So it's nearly 1 year to the day when this topic was started for the STM32 based NVEM. And today I can happily share that the RT1052 version of Remora is 99.9% complete with the NVMPG now operational!

github.com/scottalford75/Remora-RT1052/tree/dev

The code will work for the NVEM and EC300. It should work for the EC500 but not tested and it won't have all the IO available until I can get a board test.

Currently MCUXpresso IDE and a CMSIS-DAP adaptor is required to compile and flash the firmware to the board. I'll start to work on DAP-LINK code to hopefully get drag and drop flashing working. This should make things easier if I can get it to work.

I'll merge dev into main as a 0.0 release.

Don't forget that your other Remora thread goes back even further to April 2021. Each thread having over 80K views (jan '23)
www.forum.linuxcnc.org/18-computer/42276...ller-via-spi?start=0

Hi,

sorry to bother you all, but I'm trying to set up remora on my NVEM V2. I was able to flash the firmware and upload the config file. LinuxCNC seems to be able to talk to the board (there is a lot of network traffic between the two); however, I'm having troubles with the inputs (I'm trying the e-stop, but it's the same with the others): when I flip the e-stop button the state of the input pin changes (the voltage drops to 0V as I'm using an NC button) but remora does not "see" it, the input pin in the HAL configuration stays low in any case.

Do you have any suggestions of what could be causing this? May I have flashed the wrong firmware/incorrectly?

I have to say I haven't tried sending some gcode yet, I wanted to have the safeties active before anything else.

Best regards,
Alberto M.
 

I tried sending some gcode and I got an immediate error about joint 2.

Could it be the 12v power supply is not good enough? On the external cover of the NVEM card the input voltage range is 12v-32v, but on the board itself it says 18v minimum and I was wondering if that could be the issue.

Best Regards,
Alberto M.

Hi,

sorry to bother you all, but I'm trying to set up remora on my NVEM V2. I was able to flash the firmware and upload the config file. LinuxCNC seems to be able to talk to the board (there is a lot of network traffic between the two); however, I'm having troubles with the inputs (I'm trying the e-stop, but it's the same with the others): when I flip the e-stop button the state of the input pin changes (the voltage drops to 0V as I'm using an NC button) but remora does not "see" it, the input pin in the HAL configuration stays low in any case.

Do you have any suggestions of what could be causing this? May I have flashed the wrong firmware/incorrectly?

I have to say I haven't tried sending some gcode yet, I wanted to have the safeties active before anything else.

Best regards,
Alberto M.

Hi Alberto, 

Sounds to me that the config file is not loading correctly. Can you share your config.txt file here? If the config file is not correct JSON format it will not load. The only way to know this is to have the serial connection to see the output from the controller. I normally check the config.txt with an online JSON checker to ensure no formatting errors.

Hi,

thank you for having taken the time to help me.

The config file I used is attached. I checked it with a JSON formatter and it passed. I believe it is the same file available in the github repository, under the ethernet feature branch.

Would it be possible to download the current config from the TFTP service on the card?

In order to re-flash the firmware (if it comes to that), do I have to re-solder the wires on the UART pins and redo the procedure via the st-link software? Would you advise to leave the wires attached for debug purposes? But then I would have to figure out how to read the serial console from linux instead of using the ST software.


Best Regards,
Alberto M.


 

Hmm, if you have not modified the config file then that should not be the issue as it's known to work.

I'd approach this by re-flashing the firmware and ensuring that you have a working system using the default config built into the firmware.

After flashing the firmware, LinuxCNC should be able to connect and come out of e-stop. You should be able to jog the X, Y and Z axes.

Then I'd move onto getting IO working etc. Note that LinuxCNC will only see the IO toggling when out of e-stop (comms running to the board).