Potential All-in-One Single Board Computers

RISC-V is almost open source everything. They have been avoiding open source firmware and perusing EFI like everything else.

We have been busy with amd64 and will get some RISC-V boards later this fall to try.

I skimmed through this thread a couple of times, and here's a quick summary. I am new to this topic, so please correct me if I am wrong.

To run LCNC comfortably, the board must have at least 2Gb RAM (4Gb recommended), 1GHz dual-core ARM CPU and a GPU with a known-to-work driver.

To run stepgen, the board must have a microcontroller or FPGA. The microcontroller core might be a part of SoC design (in this case the communication between Linux and MCU is done through some sort of shared memory), be a separate part on the board (in this case the board should be routed so that SPI lines of SoC and MCU are connected) or be on a different board (connected through SPI, Ethernet, PCIe...)

The most popular board is currently Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. Not because better than others, just because it's noob friendly and the community around it is huge. Remora currently only supports RPi's SPI, but there was at least one attempt to rewrite it to use a more universal driver.

The most popular Chinese SoC manufacturers are: Allwinner, Rockchip and Amlogic. Some Allwinner SoCs have a built-in AR100 core that was successfully used for stepgen. Rockchip SoCs usually have several Cortex-M0 cores and Amlogic SoCs have a Cortex-M4, but so far nobody tried to use them for stepgen.

Some SoCs from more reputable manufacturers are Texas Instruments AMxxxx (they have IT's own design PRUs that were successfully used as stepgen), NXP i.MX8M (they have Cortex-M4 that could be used as stepgen), Renesas RZ/V2L (they have Cortex-M33 that could be used as a stepgen).

Soon, RISC-V based options for both Linux and MCU side should become available.

Yes, that is pretty much it.

LCNC can run on 1GB of RAM but things like the backplot in the GUI need more RAM so 2+GB keep it running smoothly and quickly.

Remora is also working over Ethernet.

There are also some low cost FPGA cards that work well over Ethernet.
forum.linuxcnc.org/27-driver-boards/4442...pga-controller-board

The RK3588 has been shown to run a base thread with low enough jitter for software stepping to ~66KHz.
forum.linuxcnc.org/18-computer/48079-can...cnc?start=250#274284
 

Bari wrote:

The RK3588 has been shown to run a base thread with low enough jitter for software stepping to ~66KHz.
forum.linuxcnc.org/18-computer/48079-can...cnc?start=250#274284

 

We should not be using software stepping on these devices. We should use an interrupt driven timer thread to generate step pulses that can be controlled in the same way as a Mesa card. I've had a bit of look at it and its probably easier than you might first think.

Another board we might want to look at, assuming an rpi4b approach to it, is the bananapi-m5, which has 4G of memory and a 4 core 2 gigahertz processor that runs kool enough it doesn't have to have a full complement of heat sinks stuck to it.
Around $80/copy, needs a psu, keyboard and mouse. Or just the psu if running it from some other machine on your local net.

I'm running several of them using the klipper firmware to drive 3d printers, running on current ambian.The video is supplied over the network by an nguinx server and I can run the printer from any machine on my local home net just by sending FF to machine alias:80 in the FF address line. I'd luv to be able to standardize all my stuff to this board. Or if you have keyboard and rodent, FF looking at localhost:80 gets control of it all.

Cheers all, Gene

Banana pi BPI-M5
wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-M5

That 16Gb of emmc memory is not used by armbian jammy so I mount it & stash stuff I want to save over a system upgrade in it for ready access in case the upgrade goes south. With kiauh.sh in charge of the updates of everything including the armbian install, I've not ever needed it.

With an update to rpspi for the different gpio driver, I see no reason this board should not run LinuxCNC even better than an rpi4.

Can the last 7-8 posts please go into a new thread about Mesa bus switches or similar. It going a bit off track for a list of SBC's compatible with LCNC.