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Hi all, 

In case anyone else is interested in using inexpensive mini PCs and Mesa ethernet boards, I thought I'd share some details of my new setup. It's early days, but it seems to be working well--I'd be interested to hear about other people's experience with similar setups...

Mini PC, N95 $120 It's tiny, like 3-1/2" square!
Mesa 7192T $110 has ethernet and parallel port for the G540 (you need to build your own enclosure and supply 5v)
Gecko G540

I got the PC off Amazon:
www.amazon.com/dp/B0DGQ1P667?ref=ppx_yo2..._fed_asin_title&th=1
described as:
Mini PC Alder Lake-Ν95 (up to 3.4GHz) 4 Cores 4 Threads, Mini Computers 8GB DDR5 256GB M.2 SSD, Mini PC Dual Lan Support

Here are my somewhat cryptic notes about the configuration process. It's basically an assembly of techniques from other threads on this forum. I changed the IP address of the card from the default, but in hindsight I don't think that was really necessary.

Install linuxcnc from USB stick

Disable Turbo mode in BIOS (not sure this is really necessary)

(Note: there is no hyperthreading option in this particular machine)

Change mesa card jumper for "static IP from EEPROM"

edit /etc/network/interfaces to add static address for the card:
auto enp2s0
  iface enp2s0 inet static
    address 10.10.10.11
    netmask 255.255.255.0

sudo mesaflash --device 7I92T --addr 10.10.10.10 --write 7i92t_g540d.bin

change grub:
  isolcpus=2,3

===== At this point I was getting network timeouts. The fix for this has been posted on this forum, and is as follows: ============

Because of network latency issues it is necessary to install the dkms driver per this thread:
docs.google.com/document/d/1jeV_4VKzVmOI...ading=h.macj649sy0yq
Open a terminal window and Type the following lines: 
sudo apt update 
sudo dpkg -P raspi-firmware
sudo apt dist-upgrade
Note that the second line (sudo dpkg …) removes firmware for the raspberry pi incorrectly installed by Debian and is a bug out of our control

Type:
sudo apt update
you need to install some utilities. Type:
sudo apt install build-essential dkms 
If you have not installed a later kernel as described above install linux-headers. Type:
sudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo apt install r8168-dkms 

Rob

rodw wrote:

For a control box, the simplest way is to use a switched, EMI filtered and fused IEC connector
www.amazon.com.au/uxcell%C2%AE-IEC320-Sw...Filter/dp/B01FT0VRTS
You can see one of these used at the bottom right of my photo shared earlier.

But in your case, this won't work if you want to switch the router on and off because the current of the router will be too high for the typically 6 amp AC rating. Plus you would not want the electrically noisy router to be on the same side of the EMI filter as your electronics.

So in your case, I would use a fixed power lead and a cable gland to bring mains into the control box to two household breakers around 10 amp. One of these will protect your router circuit and the other your electronics, On the electronics circuit, immediately after the breaker, fit an EMI filter
www.jaycar.com.au/240v-ac-emi-filter/p/MS4001
Then connect all of your power supplies to the filtered mains power.

Filtering the power is really important to avoid spurious triggering from electrical noise. I learnt the hard way.

The next thing to work out is your estop. That's a bit tricky because you need to disable the router and the stepper motor power supply without using any relays that could fail. The estop needs to drop power to your router power and  stepper mains motion. You could use 2 phases of a 3 phase breaker but technically you would then need  to use a safety relay to be compliant.
Its probably acceptable to disable your stepper drivers using the enable pins on them that are usually left disconnected.


 

Thank you Rod,

I have been thinking about your advice on the router, I am trying something I don't have any practical knowledge of, I will just leave this one out, I will get the other three working, as my knowledge increase, I might rewire it again. This just my hobby project. But I really like learning electronics now, I have always been afraid of it.

You are right, the ENABLE pin on the CLT57T-V41 is left unconnected. During my learning of this driver, I used only the Raspberry Pi 4 and Python to program it, setting ENABLE to high disables the motor.

Best regards,

...behai.
 

Glad you waded into the live build environment. Wait till I get you going on the raspberry Pi 
Sorry it failed for you.. I had plenty of that. The biggest issue I had was getting apt configured and installing the gpt keys.
Bjarne from Etherlab was a big help there.

I think Linuxcnc builds all of the Debs in the one go.
There was a really interesting pull request from Stefan Moller that has yet to be committed which installed the dependencies the Debian way (eg. Just using one command. It would have been nice to see it in the code by now.

Hey,
sorry to bother you with this but i can't get this to work and i'm kinda frustrated.
I can't get out of e-stop and get a bad spi payload = 646174

My hardware:
Raspberry Pi 4B
BTT Octopus Pro v1.1 with stm32f446
TMC2209 Drivers with jumpers in SPI mode

I did the wiring acording to the docs and also the installation.
With cutecom i get the output in the attached file for the octopus xyz.hal.
SPI and UART are activated on the Pi and i already did a rewiring of the whole thing.
I'm tottaly new to LinuxCNC so i would really appreciate your help on this.

Thanks! peter

 

Look for the ethercat thread, process is the same for as for the amd64 platform.

I have gone through the installation process and it completes without any errors.

Houston, we have a problem, i ordered the io port expander (mcp23017) in wrong package so28 instead of ssop28, and the zener diodes is missing from the order, and i missed the i2c port pullup resistors from the design this need a littlebit of workaround, but the outputs are working now (tbd 62783). Tested with 5v and 24v without load, i messed up 1 of the w5100s-evb-pico-s usb port by pulling the whole microusb inside out but now this programmed trough the SWD debug port, the positive side is i do not need to printing debug info in the usb serial port.

I can give it a try, could you please share more details on how you got ethercat installed so i can reproduce your setup?

Just gone 3pm here in Sydney.

No something interesting.

I worked on a little project using an FPGA dev board to run MESA's hostmot2 firmware. First attempt was based on the 7c81 using either SPI (raspberry pi) or EPP (best on motherboard based parallel ports). The issue with the board I used is that the EEPROM need to be changed and the headers were already soldered on.
That same hardware can also be used with the LinuxcncRIO project.

Another project I had a go at was modding the 7i90 Smart serial firmware to support 4 encoders to run on a dev board.

For my latest I've grabbed a different dev board (eeprom is correct size & bought with the headers unslodered, but this time I'll be trying a Ethernet interface, chip is same as use on the Mesa products, so no having to rewrite a driver, which requires a couple of steps, first being working out the instructions of the softcore, working how the driver talks to the chip and then how it integrates with the rest.

Some pics, 2x17 ports from breakout boards (mesa 25 pin daughter boards can be used as well) and 4 extra pins for 2 smart serial ports or extra I\O.

First off is the FPGA from aliexpress:
 

The Ethernet board, this is experiment only, the FPGA board sits on top, disregard the type of 2x25 headers they can be changed to suit. Should have the boards in a couple of weeks.
 

One of the daughter boards from the orignal project.
 

Pretty.

cnc@raspberrypi:~$ sudo apt-add-repository "deb buildbot2.highlab.com/debian/ bookworm master-uspace 2.9-uspace"
sudo: apt-add-repository: command not found

Congratulations on your results so far.

I have never tryied LinuxCNC in Raspberry Pi. But, based on my experience in PC based LCNC, I don't think you will ever have any reliability issues running it in step/dir. LinuxCNC is a hell of a reliable motion controller.

 

We would like our LinuxCNC system to control an activity light. This would be a red light on the machine active when the motors are engaged. Does LinuxCNC already have a feature to control such a thing? Where should I look to find the interface?
We are using a Mesa board and a Raspberry Pi. Can I route a control signal through to an output pin on the Mesa board?

Thank you.

Maybe not.. now it stops at:

cnc@raspberrypi:~$ sudo echo "deb buildbot2.highlab.com/debian/ bookworm master-uspace 2.9-uspace" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
bash: /etc/apt/sources.list: Permission denied

Hi guys!

New user here with limited knowledge. Trying to convert an old mill, have a rpi5 and a 7i97T for the job. Planned to use MesaCT to help me with the start of the config, but there is states the 7i97T needs LinuxCNC 2.10.

I've already installed the "Raspberry Pi 5 OS based on Debian Bookworm " from the website, which i'm now trying to update using this post. No luck so far for me!

seems to fail from;

sudo cp -r /etc/apt/*.* ~/aptsudo wget buildbot2.highlab.com/buildbot-archive-key.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d

returns;

cp: cannot copy a directory, '/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d', into itself, '/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/trusted.gpg.d'
cp: cannot stat '/home/cnc/aptsudo': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat 'wget': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat 'buildbot2.highlab.com/buildbot-archive-key.gpg': No such file or directory

I'm running linuxcnc 2.9.4 (which I downloaded from Debian 12 Bookworm PREEMPT-RT ISO ) in VirtualBox in order to try out the various UIs etc. The actual CNC is being driven from a Raspberry Pi. I'm currently running gmoccapy but I'd like to try out the QtDragon UI.

I found some instructions that said I needed to install linuxcnc-uspace-qtvcp but it's not in the debian repo and I didn't want to start adding random sources without knowing what I'm doing. There are also references to modifying .ini files but there are a lot under sim.gmoccapy so it's not clear which one to modify, and in any case, I thought using QtDragon meant not using gmoccapy.