My take on Ethernet IO for LinuxCNC

Greetings from Oulu, Finland!

First time poster here, even though I've been reading this forum for couple of years now.

I've been looking for an easy way to connect to my machines via ethernet for quite a long already. Now that there has been excellent development for the upcoming version 2.7 with uspace RTAPI, I decided to try to work with an STM32 microcontroller and connect to it with ethernet. And it has turned out quite well. I'm able to run the interface in realtime with LinuxCNC 2.7 (with some latency issues). Currently quadrature encoders, hardware step generation and PWM are supported. If realtime is not required, I can compile the same driver for userspace too and then it works with 2.6 versions as well.

I wrote a short webpage at pekka.eu/cnc to describe the current status. Any feedback is much appreciated and I can certainly share more if someone is interested. The whole thing is of course very much a work in progress at the moment and I don't expect it to be really usable for anything serious as such, but in a long run it would be excellent to have a cheap, hackable IO solution now that we will have the possibility to use ethernet in LinuxCNC 2.7..

Finally, big thanks for the authors of LinuxCNC and especially the developers of the new features of LinuxCNC 2.7.

Best Regards,
Pekka