Up squared board FPGA?

vre wrote:

Maybe rockpro64+mesa 7i90hd(spi) or 6i24(pciE)
can be a good combination for a tiny size system.
I have ordered this and i will tell you more next days when i get it.

That's actually what I wanted to do. I really wanted to use an ARM board but it's really hard to judge the actual compute power of an ARM chip compared to an X86 processor, and I need a decent processor to handle machine vision cameras. ARM boards also have the issue of being very specific with Kernel requirements which is why pretty much every ARM SBC has a distro build that's supplied with it.

This thing here is pretty neat but has alot of ARM/Xilinx Weirdness going on.
zedboard.org/product/ultra96

Rockchip 3399 was full linux support
and it is powerfull also rockpro64 board has nice i/o
www.cnx-software.com/2018/11/25/benchmar...m-sbc-rk3399-exynos/

I came across a community post for the Up2. apparently they don't intend to unlock the FPGA on that board at all since a custom firmware can fry it because of the way it's implemented.

Thinking about picking up 2 of the Rockpro64's to mess with. Ideally I'd like more USB3 ports and 2 ethernet ports. I can't find a stout ARM SBC that really meets that either way but they're cheap enough I can mess with them and see if I can configure which interfaces I use for what and get something going.

I'll try to get one running with the 7i96 I use with my current setup and I'll stick that in the native Ethernet port. I'll use a USB3 - ethernet adapter to get a VNC going. Usually I check that the native Ethernet port is on the PCIe bus and not USB, this one is on an RGMII interface which looks like something RT capable?

Thinking about picking up the 7i90 SPI as mentioned before once I know I can get it going with the eth board. I'm curios how spi compares to eth for RT performance. Having a little trouble finding a good 50 pin breakout for the 7i90. I need step/direction and 24v I/O. So it looks like either a 7i76 with a DB25 to 26 pin cable, or a 7i47 and 7i37TA. Either way it's way overboard with I/O.

Look this

tinker board has a less powerful rockchip the previous version of rk3399 the rk3288

browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/418070?baseline=507525

Also i found this
www.reddit.com/r/CNC/comments/6b6g05/pyc...ller_on_pure_python/

vre wrote:

Look this

tinker board has a less powerful rockchip the previous version of rk3399 the rk3288

browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/418070?baseline=507525

Also i found this
www.reddit.com/r/CNC/comments/6b6g05/pyc...ller_on_pure_python/

I wouldn't doubt any new ARM board is capable enough to run LinuxCNC well, My issue comes from the fact that when you add decent camera's into the mix it weighs down the CPU. I've seen performance get bad on a dual core i5 but my AM4 A10 APU runs it well. On the other hand my program was a mess at that time so I'm sure it's running more efficiently now. I will try to build it on an ARM board soon and see what happens.

The second link is pretty interesting. I don't suppose there's any DMA-GPIO impliments in LinuxCNC?

andypugh wrote:

blazini36 wrote:

vre wrote:

The second link is pretty interesting. I don't suppose there's any DMA-GPIO impliments in LinuxCNC?

Somebody looked at it, but I don't know how well it worked out.
forum.linuxcnc.org/18-computer/20514-emc...y-pi?start=150#33149

Actually looking at the PyCNC thing I get the idea that that's a similar approach to what you'd do with USB hardware.

Looking at 96boards stuff I came across a Rock960 Enterprise Edition which is a larger RK3399 board with more I/O. It'd probably be perfect but for some reason they don't actually seem to be selling that board. The Rock960 Consumer Edition is pretty similar to the Rock64 Pro but the 96 boards stuff can use mezzanine boards, one of which is a bigger Max10 FPGA that appears to be open. If I could get HostMot2 running on that I think that would be perfect.

Their Hikey970 has similar Arm cores but it's a 4+4 vs a 2+4 core setup. That'd be perfect, it's just a bit expensive for something I'm not sure I can get running

Rock960

FPGA mezzanine

Hi...this is encouraging to me, but also worrisome.Encouraging, because it acknowledges the FPGA programmability could be a selling point for hobbyists who want to implement new interfaces. Worrisome, because (a) "wishlist" items like this usually do not happen at all, despite good intentions; and (b) it sounds like you might not be ready to open up the design enough for your technically competent customers to contribute.

turnkey pcb assembly

BillyTse wrote:

Hi...this is encouraging to me, but also worrisome.Encouraging, because it acknowledges the FPGA programmability could be a selling point for hobbyists who want to implement new interfaces. Worrisome, because (a) "wishlist" items like this usually do not happen at all, despite good intentions; and (b) it sounds like you might not be ready to open up the design enough for your technically competent customers to contribute.

Actually, it already exists in a somewhat different form. Both Xylinx and Intel(Altera) make FPGAs with hard ARM processors in the chip. Machinekit has already exploited a few Dev boards using these SOCs. I've been messing with a DE10-Nano and it's actually pretty good. The processor is a bit too weak for what I originally wanted to use the UP2 board for but so far I would think it would have no problem acting as a full machine controller for a Mill or lathe or something with some decent interface hardware attached.

The UP squared board was a good idea but it looks like they added the FPGA with high hopes for real GPIO but stopped short and settled for using it as an on-board Arduino.