anyone have experience with rt-stepper dongle?

This looks terribly interesting, but I haven't found anyone talking about using it.

rt-stepper
www.ecklersoft.com/

It's a smooth stepper like device for LinuxCNC, and has ports of LinuxCNC, minus the real time bits for Windows and OS X in addition to Linux. Somebody must have tried this out, what's the word?

I'm hoping this would let me use a Raspberry Pi as my PC without having to wait for a proper real-time port. I suspect it wouldn't be terribly fast, but it would make a nice portable setup with a little ShapeOko router on a cart.

Pete

I did download the rt-stepper source quite some while ago, just to have a look at it.
At the time it was quite limited in scope, certainly regards gcode.

Looks like he has made some improvements since then, but exactly how it performs...well I'd be interested to hear too.

regards

really interesting! this way one can use his laptop!
but...isn't it quite simple to make this dongle? i mean, for one who knows how to setup an USB chip and to program a PIC to read serial, buffer, and write step/dir pin out..
strange he didn't release the dongle under GPL..

at the end 45kHz isn't bad, my CNC PC goes at 42kHz max...

did someone contact him?

dab77 wrote:

really interesting! this way one can use his laptop!
but...isn't it quite simple to make this dongle? i mean, for one who knows how to setup an USB chip and to program a PIC to read serial, buffer, and write step/dir pin out..
strange he didn't release the dongle under GPL..

at the end 45kHz isn't bad, my CNC PC goes at 42kHz max...

did someone contact him?

I did send an email to the creator / author, I'll definitely update the thread when I hear something. I suspect you saw this Andy, but the source releases are in the download section of the Eckler Software site. I could certainly pull them and run a diff, but I wouldn't be a terribly good judge of what the differences meant.

Pete

I think the reason the dongle is as it is, has to do with the evolution of the product / project. He originally had just some rudimentary code to interpret the g-code and instruct the dongle. A year and a half ago he replaced this code with a version of EMC. Perhaps the previous code is what ArcEye saw. It seems odd that if this worked with EMC for over a year it wouldn't be more widely known, and perhaps be listed as supported hardware. I guess there's a question as to whether this is LinuxCNC proper, or a derivative code base that requires 3rd party hardware, it's a bit different then say the Mesa drivers / hostmot approach.

Pete

I heard back from the developer, he said someone had asked about this previously, but he's not certain himself if it has been done. He felt as long as you could do the build from source on the ARM device, it should work. The devil being in the details I suppose. I'll let the list know if I take the plunge and get one. I don't have any ARM boards currently, and the wait on the Raspberry Pi looks to be about 3 or 4 weeks.

Pete