EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

ArcEye
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21 Jan 2013 17:48 #28909 by ArcEye

Replied by ArcEye on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

All the discussion etc is on the developers list

sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=emc-developers

I think they dropped the RPi as being too low powered to make a realistic platform, but there was quite a lot of work on the Beagelbone.

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kinsa
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21 Jan 2013 18:04 - 22 Jan 2013 11:30 #28912 by kinsa

Replied by kinsa on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

I haven't found the instructions to compile under Beaglebone either. Only the simulator mode.

UPDATE:

Got it!

./configure --with-platform=beaglebone/raspberry

Last edit: 22 Jan 2013 11:30 by kinsa. Reason: Solved

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kinsa
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24 Jan 2013 15:32 #29066 by kinsa

Replied by kinsa on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

ArcEye wrote:
All the discussion etc is on the developers list

sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=emc-developers

I think they dropped the RPi as being too low powered to make a realistic platform, but there was quite a lot of work on the Beagelbone.

I've got it running under Xenomai. Initial results seems good but not suitable for sw stepgen. I'm planning to pair this with a low cost FPGA board and see how it goes.

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mhaberler
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24 Jan 2013 17:23 #29068 by mhaberler

Replied by mhaberler on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

To build for Xenomai, 2 conditions must hold:

- the Rpi must be running a Xenomai kernel
- the Xenomai userland support package must be installed (git.xenomai.org/?p=xenomai-2.6.git;a=summary)

configure.log will tell how that detection goes.

As far as I am concerned, the raspberry platform option will stay in the code, but I will not put any effort into packaging or usability; if somebody else does, I'm happy to integrate patches.

- Michael

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kinsa
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13 Feb 2013 14:43 - 13 Feb 2013 18:51 #30003 by kinsa

Replied by kinsa on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

Just an update, I was able to offload the base thread to an external PIC micro using SPI.

My observation is that bit-banging an 8 bit data bus is not optimal. The RPi SPI has 64 bytes of buffer so transferring data is quick with minimal cpu overhead.

I'm currently running the SPI clock at 15 MHz, a 64 bytes transfer completes in around 45 us. The maximum SPI speed that the RPi can operate at is 31 MHz. This is too fast for a PIC but doable with an FPGA.

Cheers!

UDPATE:

I finished porting my rt-8p8c code to the new PIC micro.

It's currently running using the mini tk interface over ssh.

Here is the output of top with backplot enabled:

top - 10:48:06 up  9:58,  2 users,  load average: 0.53, 0.60, 0.56
Tasks:  59 total,   1 running,  58 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 38.7 us,  6.6 sy,  0.0 ni, 53.1 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  1.6 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:    498864 total,   204120 used,   294744 free,    21304 buffers
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 used,        0 free,   117996 cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
 6547 root      20   0 29216  12m 4936 S  35.2  2.6   8:51.26 wish8.5           
 6546 root      20   0 11548 5224 4520 S   5.2  1.0   2:00.87 milltask          
 4237 root      20   0 10496 3368 2360 S   3.9  0.7   1:29.53 sshd              
 6537 root      20   0 30040  11m 6144 S   2.9  2.4   0:47.77 hal_manualtoolc   
 6553 root      20   0  4620 1340 1024 R   1.3  0.3   0:10.15 top               
 2972 root      20   0  9504 3092 2364 S   0.3  0.6   0:29.58 sshd              
 6524 root      20   0  4128 1728 1440 S   0.3  0.3   0:03.32 io                
    1 root      20   0  2104  712  612 S   0.0  0.1   0:02.03 init              
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd          
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.02 ksoftirqd/0       
    5 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:04.17 kworker/u:0       
    6 root      -2   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:02.12 rcu_kthread       
    7 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper           
    8 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kdevtmpfs         
    9 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 netns             
   10 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.23 sync_supers       
   11 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 bdi-default

Last edit: 13 Feb 2013 18:51 by kinsa. Reason: updates

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kinsa
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15 Feb 2013 11:32 #30090 by kinsa

Replied by kinsa on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

I have created a wiki page: wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RaspbianXenomaiBuild documenting the steps I took to create a working Xenomai LinuxCNC image for RPi.

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JZHA1985
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15 Feb 2013 16:00 #30096 by JZHA1985

Replied by JZHA1985 on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

A kickstarter if/when things come together would be nice, although I know that's far from a simple ordeal.

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mhaberler
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15 Feb 2013 16:28 #30098 by mhaberler

Replied by mhaberler on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

It is possible to run LinuxCNC on the Rasberry - in principle. It compiles, and runs on a Xenomai kernel.

that said, be advised that at least with Axis, the Pi runs out of CPU cycles badly - you might want to adjust your expectations downwards a bit.

- Michael

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kinsa
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15 Feb 2013 22:34 #30121 by kinsa

Replied by kinsa on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

Here's the youtube link to an actual test using the miniemc2 frontend:

Cheers!

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kinsa
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16 Feb 2013 10:31 - 16 Feb 2013 10:41 #30167 by kinsa

Replied by kinsa on topic EMC2 running on Raspberry Pi?

FWIW, here is the screen grab of RPi running Axis over remote X:

Note that RPi is overclocked to 800 MHz.

The sshd load drops considerably if the preview is disabled, it goes down below 10%.

Last edit: 16 Feb 2013 10:41 by kinsa.

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