ColorCNC Colorlight 5A-75E/5A-75B as FPGA controller board

Well, it seems to me that nobody can forbid me to learn the technology and make an open-source implementation without having to obtain the ethercat membership?

romanetz wrote:

Well, it seems to me that nobody can forbid me to learn the technology and make an open-source implementation without having to obtain the ethercat membership?

Well you would be in breach of licence agreements and copyright and you would be exposed to legal action by a large well resourced gobal  organisation. It could become expensive....

An independent slave implementation should not violate any copyrights,
but it would certainly violate EtherCAT patents.

Note that the Primary EtherCAT patents will expire soon (in the next few years)

Let us focus in this thread to the development of a LinuxCNC dirver for the Etherbone protocol and not deviate into grey areas .

At this moment I've developed three BOBs for the HUB-75 ports:

• Sinking input (GPIO in, slow encoders)
• Sourcing output (GPIO out, PWM)
• Differential stepgen (up to 400 kHz step frequency)

From the repository one can download all KiCad schematics and production files (Gerber). For people from Western Europe I also included a list where all parts can be ordered (Reichtelt, non-affiliate).When you decide to build the boards yourself and use Mouser or DigiKey, please share your list with me, so other users can benefit from it as well.

For these boards I have some questions:

• any suggestions on functions? At this moment I'm looking into a BOB for a fast encoder (up to 1 MHz) and a BOB for a bit more heavy GPIO out, which can be used for a heatbed or extruder like component.
• I was considering to put these boards on PcbWay, which would be an affiliate link. Has anybody experience with this, and would it be acceptable within this community. One is always free to upload the production files to any PCB-producer of their liking.

AI, AO (these are just must-have), RS-485 (spindle VFD communication over modbus RTU), CAN, SPI - for DRO LED displays, I2C. for digital communications a kind of FIFO is needed to match network packet exchange interval and throughput of the serial bus .
it's a point to discuss whether include riscv-cpu in firmware or not, but the possibilities with that options are incredible: any kind of user-defined packet-based digital communication, say, modbus rtu onboard processing, or mapping of modbus rtu registers onto etherbone addresses.
I'm exploring the possibility to update the firmware over network and Lattice dual-boot capability.
Regarding PCBs, jlcpcb.com is very popular among countries near China

I've updated my repository with some new features:
- unified driver
- acceleration limit in stepgen is now working
- FPGA internal clock for peripherals Is 40MHz and Is passing the timing closure.
- some pre coocked firmware are available

Now the board communicates to driver the peripherals configuration and the driver adapts automatically, no need to rebuild the driver for changes in peripherals or board version or revision. The only change that still require a rebuild of the driver Is the change of ip address. I suppose that there a way to pass parameters to the driver at invocation but still didnt try.

Todo:
- pass to the driver the ip and frequency when invoked
- create a configurator utility for speeding up the board configuration
here you can find the driver, firmwares, template for litex and the hal I'm using in my machine: 

github.com/faeboli/Lcnc
if anybody wants to try out my implementation I would be grateful, I was able to test only a pair of boards
Thanks!