LinuxCNC-RIO - RealtimeIO for LinuxCNC based on FPGA (ICE40 / ECP5)

That board looks sweet!

If you have analog ports that could be broken out I would buy one. Have a few projects in mind that need a analog port (thinking a height control for a CNC CO2 laser that follows the warped wood..yes a thcad would work but a few more projects need 10+ analog input). 4-20ma is preferred over 0-10v due to noise issues.


I like the plug in design for stepper motors as can probably find cables so we don't have to wire them by hand.

Personally prefer Ethernet cables for everything as they are much easier/faster to crimp by hand than those white connectors and I can wire directly to a machine 20 foot from my control panel. Wire and connectors are cheap and abundant

What makes projects like this succeed and become interesting is good setup instructions and documentation. Bonus points if you can make a pnf config style config generator. Time is much more expensive than the boards themselves, I'll pick a $250 mesa board over an unknown one with no documentation because it's going to save me $1k+ in time.

Hope you keep developing it. Looks awesome!

riogui is a pretty good way to config the board modules, and it also spits out a pretty good working config. Like all of the config utilities there is an amount of hand config editing required.

Checkout the this github page, shows the riogui.
github.com/multigcs/riocore

yes, i know, documentation is everything, but that's exactly what i don't enjoy
But as cornholio already said, you save a lot of work with the hal/ini configuration, everything you saw in the video is generated from the .json config.

I don't want to make a business out of it, it's just a hobby, but of course I'm happy if others use it and like it.

there are no ADC's broken out on this board, but they can be extended via I2C, also possible via Modbus, but then they are not as fast.

Thanks to 'festlv' fixing the ecp5 pin generator,
the Colorlite i5 works with riocore:

 

Wow the number of supported boards is getting really extensive.

Last picture, a CPU, a HDMI port, DRAM.... how close is that to running LinuxCNC on it completely ?
Thinking of it, what are the chances of compiling an RT kernel for Porteus Linux? That is the ONLY really lite fully featured Linux out there, and it has a KIOSK mode already.... Oh hell, time...
It does run perfectly with 1GB or RAM, tested, probably will be fine with 512MB, and that is the "embedded CPU" territory.