Raspberry Pi 5 with 7c81 WORKING!

Thanks to the wonderful efforts of everyone recently, I have been able to get my 7c81 working excellently with my Raspberry Pi 5 on the 2.10.0~pre0 (self built) version using the `hm2_spix` driver.

I have a lot of configuration and testing to do, but thus far it seems to be working flawlessly. 

I did have a few things to get it working the way I wanted, one was getting remote access and spi working for flashing:


I also had to replace the hm2 module load with the spix version in the `foo.hal` file.




Ignore the mess of wires, I need to get some mounting stuff figured out, plus all of the plasma cutting controls and so on figured out next too.

And for a bit more proof in the pudding some pictures of the results of a sharpie taped to the plasma head. 

 

Well after finally working out my chinese dev board was dead, second one that has failed, I loaded a Numato Mimas Spartan 6 board with 7c81 firmware modded to suit and can confirm RPi5 communicates. To make things more fun the CE0 line on my Pi is not playing so had to swap over to CE1.

So after 12 months of bitching & carrying on I'm a happy camper.

Now time to design & build some interface boards. Yay!

Quick update, the Chinese dev board is not at fault, it was the usb-blaster programmer I was using (was constantly incorrectly identifying the flash chip and programming the sram had issues as well), switching to a FT2232 based programmer allowed resuming of programming the above mentioned board. No need to design interface boards.

With regards to the "firmware=hm2/7c81/G540X2.BIT" this is not required as the 7c8* & 7i* boards have the firmware programmed into flash that retains the firmware during power off. The firmware is programmed once and only reprogrammed when you require a new configuration.

With qtdragon I have blank toolpath screen, but it only appearing when exit prompt appear.
I tried with fkms,kms -pi5 etc but without results, regular axis display working correctly.

I doubt very much whether this would be an issue related to the hm2_spix driver. I would suggest you start another topic related to the qtdragon issue.