Which Mesa Card Should I Buy?

Thank you for the comment Jon.

Based on that feedback, I think this guide should stay here in the forums so there isn't any unintentional 'preference' conveyed to new users.  I'll do my best to compose this in a forum-friendly format.

Great work, just for the direct connection (spi), might be an idea for the time being to mention the RPi5 is unsupported at the moment. Wouldn't want anyone to throw money at something that doesn't work yet (grumble grumble grumble).

cornholio wrote:

Great work, just for the direct connection (spi), might be an idea for the time being to mention the RPi5 is unsupported at the moment. Wouldn't want anyone to throw money at something that doesn't work yet (grumble grumble grumble).
 

How's this for section 4?

• Raspberry Pi
  • Pi plugs directly in to a Mesa motherboard via the Pi’s GPIO pins
    • NOTE - RPi 5 is not supported for direct plug-in as of 2/2024

HAving written a couple of howtos on the forum, I recommend you write your posts in a text editor and past the text into the posts.
I save mine in Google drive. much easier than fighting with the forum editor

for example, my Ethercat sticky has been edited countless times as the environment changes this way.

The guide looks very good, would've really helped me when I got started.

The Raspberrys should also be able to connect via ethernet, don't they? That should also work for the Pi5, so it's not completely unusable.
I'm not really deep into this topic so take my word with a bit of caution, this is just a quick thought that came into my mind.

The "expansion ports" section does explain that the ports might not be compatible with each other, but it doesn't really say which ports are exactly compatible.

Maybe a table like:
|Source|Target|Compatible|Comment|
|26 Pin|DB25|Yes|Needs adapter/custom firmware|
for all possible combinations could help.

Also a quick note that you need to connect ethernet ports directly without a switch, otherwise someone might want to use a PC with only one ethernet port that he needs for internet and tries to combine it with a switch. Same goes for the sserial communication ofc.

Again, these are just my thoughts reading through the draft, other than that it really looks great so far.

Thanks folks, exactly the sort of feedback I'm after.

I'll edit and repost.

Whew...

Let me know if anything is horribly wrong and I'll try to brave the forum editor.

I wonder if Tommy could delete a couple of his early posts and the ones where Spumco said delete and then this would be a contiguous read! 
Great work!

rodw wrote:

I wonder if Tommy could delete a couple of his early posts and the ones where Spumco said delete and then this would be a contiguous read! 
Great work!
 

Thank you Rod. I think that's the plan once Tommy gets to it.