ESP32/S2/S3 LinuxCNC Controller (6 axis hardware step gen), USB plug-and-play

Id buy this! Mesa is great but for small/cheap machines it's often most of the cost.

Would be great to see something like a "8 axis 3d printer" board like the btt octopus which cost 50 bucks work with linuxcnc or one with builtin drivers for 40.

Single axis idea is interesting as well. Would be nice to only run power and have a small box by each stepper.

If you need help testing will join in. I'm building a 4 axis box cutter/pen drawer (gantry 2x, y ,z) that would be hard to break. Would make a esp32 to parallel port PCB to start with.

BIGTREETECH Direct Octopus V1.1 Control Board 32Bit Silent Motherboard Support 8 Axis TMC2209 Stepper Motor Driver Compatible BTT PI V1.2/PI 2 to Running Klipper/Marlin for Voron 2.4 CoreXY 3D Printer a.co/d/0etbdjV

AliExpress is usually cheaper.

No kidding on the USB thing, almost had a few burn down cause of it. Put them in a big drywall box for this reason.

I'd love to switch over my 3d printers. Hard to justify when a mesa board costs as much as the printers I buy.... that work just well enough for me to not want to mess with it.


Would love to see input shaping in lcnc. Could turn my CNC plasma accelerations way up. I run a light weight aluminum gantry that's got a bit of vibration at high acceleration. The motors are powerful enough to get the whole 750kg table rocking back and forth when accelerations get high enough. Gantry weighs maybe 10kg.

One of these days I might dig into marlin and see what it would take. Slowly learning lcnc codebase.

Hey jimmy, if you want an 8 axis board like the octopus for linuxcnc, you can just use the octopus. its supported with remora firmware

Wait whaaattttt..... (Researches for about 20 min....mind explodes with possibilities)...... Thanks a bunch! Will try this out in a week or two

I have modified the source according to my MKS Tinybee board. And successfully compiled it, but didn't tested it. I have complied as default schematic of Tinybee. Using i2so for step/dir etc. and gpios for general input and outputs. Will this config work? It will be good board for linuxcnc with 5axis. 

Idea was inspired by this one. 

Using the PIO state-machines of the RPi Pico, quad-decode/counting of multiple encoders is a piece of cake.
I have created a distributed motion-controller using this device. Limited to 128 axes but that can be increased if need be 
However, I'm a closed-loop servo kinda guy. Can't understand why anyone would be using steppers for machining, etc.

Craig

smc.collins wrote:

Yeah well, people continue to screw around with under powered micro controllers that can't actually do the thing that's needed, run EMC headless. ESP32 while a nice toy micro for small control tasks lack real resources to actually control machine tools. The micro costing $2 or 25$ is really irrelevant at the board level, If the total cost of the board is $50 " for something that can't actually run a headless EMC install, versus something that is headless and runs a fully featured version of EMC for $200, the cost difference is trivial in a machine costing thousands as a entry point. Even cheap hobby used hardware is thousands of dollars. I have no idea why this incessant need to reduce cost is so prevalent in this community. You want to increase Linuxcnc adoption and investment, make it easier to build a machine, not harder. CNC machines are not cheap, even cheap 3d printers are not cheap. The community does not need yet another slave style control card. We need a real controller running a headless EMC install, if that's a $10 arm MCU or a $2 mcu on a dedicated card for $25 or $200 then so be it. This isn't helping the community grow in a meaningful way, it's not really helping end users, unless of course the game is to impede entry into the area by making the hardware and software difficult to use.

As for snide remarks, maybe you should try reading your own tripe before criticizing someone else's commentary.

I am a motion control dev (since 1988) and I approve of this message.
I am a fan of ESP32 and use it  With THIS  and I am a fan of ESP-NOW and wireless control. Motion? Not a chance.

The best single-chip solution for motion control is without doubt  The P2 Propeller  64 "smartpins" (all can decode quad @ sysclock/4 with no impact on any of the 8 identical cores) any pin can be a 16bit DAC, etc. Too much to list here. No godawful Arduino library nonsense, no clunky OS. Jitter? Latency? Interrupt-hell? 

Craig

 

I think the real issue is people think building a CNC machine is easy and they want it to be cheap.
There's a lot of caps you have to wear, not everyone can muster all those skills. They are the ones that think it's too hard.