PoKeys57CNC HAL component

Hi all,
With Windows 10 getting slowly obsolete, and also since I also was not 100% happy with Mach4, I looked into LinuxCNC as an alternative.
I already found the other topic on the PoKeys HAL driver , however was not succesful getting Dominiks component to run.
Before reverse engineering that component, I thought to myself "how hard could it be?". I do not need many features for my setup.

Said and done, here is my own component to run a 3-axis mill: PoKeysMotionComponent on GitHub.
I still have some things in the backlog to do, but you can already use it. Hopefully it helps someone out there.
 

Thank you for giving back to the community, it's refreshing to see rather than those that just take take take.
A Tip O The Hat to you sir

Very interesting. I have a Pokeys here so am going to give it a whirl!

Any idea of the maximum velocities you achieved?

The theoretical limit of the Pokeys57CNC is 125'000 steps per second. Whatever this might translate to, depends on the machine.
My minimill has just standard screws and also smallish steppers, so I keep it on the slow side: 360mm/min => 6mm/s => 4'800 pulses/s
The problem with steppers is, for some smooth operation, you'll want microstepping, but then you loose torque. I added a belt reduction to "help" with the torque loss, but sacrifice speed again...

I don't think modern drives loose torque with microstepping. I ran 25x microstepping on my machines.....But yes I was considering how much microstepping I could use. Maybe 8x. Adding a belt reduction is often the wise choice.

Yes, I found the specs in the manual. Seems like you could increase velocities

This is very interesting. I recently purchased a Ozaki CNC lathe with mach3 control. I don't really liked the mach3 too much, but it worked well enough. Then my HDD crashed and this seemed to be a very good opportunity to go ahead and convert it to Linuxcnc...

But then, what about the used Pokeys 56U? Then I found this. Hope it connects with the 56U too, really good to find this.

I'm afraid that the 56U is not supported. Or at least I did not add explicit support for this.

I do not know if the 56 series supports the PulseEngine V2 which I'm using to control the motion. You could try though.

In the source code there is a check , if the device is a 57CNC, which only logs a warning.
And there is another check if the "external pulse generator" is used.

Excerpt from the documentation

Pulse engine v2 supports two different pulse generator modules:
- Internal: similar to basic Pulse engine, limited to 25 kHz pulse frequency at 3 channels, uses built-in circuitry and pins
- External: new in v2, limited to 125 kHz pulse frequency at 8 channels, requires external circuitry to deserialize the data to pulses

I did some more reading of the documentation of the 56/57 boards. The internal pulse engine should be available and usable. With the limitations mentioned before.
Or if you have the, now discontinued, CNC addon board, it should be equivalent to the 57CNC board.

I will remove the checks on the component, since the way I operate the PoKeysLib is not specific to a particular board.