LinuxCNC on Raspberry Pi 5

That was going to be my suggestion- I do the same thing to backup my phone on an SSD, works really well.

Cant be too upset with any usability issues- Its only been out 5 minutes :-D

I have mixed emotions about using desktop PC's. I have previously had jitter issues (just using a parallel port based breakout board) but hope that this will be resolved with a more powerful PC and ethernet mesa card - with my newer cnc machine the stakes are high if something was to go wrong. It feels good to make use of hardware which is otherwise life expired- but its hardly an elegant solution.

having a reliable, powerful, foolproof and easy to setup rpi based system would be the holy grail for linux CNC.

Once you switch to the Mesa cards jitter isn’t an issue as you don’t need a base thread.
I’ve got an old Lenovo i5 tower that I found by the side of the road that is fine for using a Mesa Ethernet card.
Unfortunately space is at a premium in my work shop.

thankfully (kinda?) my machine is big enough that the space required by a tower PC is not worth factoring in. The electrical cabinet is bigger than many wardrobes
and it even has a nice swing out shelf for the computer :-D

The size is only kinda of benefit because i dont know when I'll ever machine anything that size, and I dont know where im going to park the lawn mower :-D

A 2nd hand PC that is able to run Linuxcnc with a Mesa card is cheaper than a Raspberry Pi, at least in most cases.

Tommy is the guru on second hand PCs for Linuxcnc, generally laptops are a no go, in case you were wondering.

I've send Mesa an email about this.... for what it's worth.. That's the only thing I can do about it I guess...

A friend of my wanted to swap my Pi4 1GB to his 4GB version. Very happy with that!! For now I can go further with Linuxcnc 2.9.1.

They are talking about 2-3 times faster, but it feels like 4-5 times faster, booting, browsing, etc... Only running Linuxcnc is endless slower...

About power draw of the Pi5, when Linuxcnc will work on it, I wil just set the usb_max_current_enable in config.txt. 7c80, SSD and Pi5 together only use 10Watt in normal state.

It may take a while tho, hopefully not too long.

One thing of note, in raspi-config there's an option to switch between wayland & X11 backends, Under "Advanced Options" -> "A6". Without this option some of the interfaces wont run because of the references to X11 functions.

I've got xfce running on mine and it does seem a bit "snappier" but that could be "all in my mind".

One thing I really like is how easy it is to boot from USB. Tho I'm just using a flash drive ATM as I have a NVME hat on the way, which should be interesting.

I installed this image (drive.google.com/file/d/1H_q0Ra-27ZDOhqu...x1f/view?usp=sharing) and it boots on my Pi5. Latency seems much better than Pi4. Is this the most recent thing?  I thought I saw something about SPI patches?

Still waiting on SPI patches. Not too sure how much traction it will get. Will probably need someone to join in and make some noise. I've lodged an issue on github, but no responses.

Maybe someone may like to ask a question on the emc mailing, as I can't do that myself. And the reasons why are not up for discussion.

I can spend some time on this. Can we start a DM conversation? I've built Linux deployments before.

The driver will need a rewrite, more than likely, due to the I\O being moved to the RP1 chip. So if you want to get into some driver coding go for it.