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I'll have to leave this to Rod & others. It's not something I could really test other than the installation bit.

regarding EtherCAT driver for rpi5 ethernet:

gitlab.com/etherlab.org/ethercat/-/issues/104

RPi 5 uses the

macb

driver (Cadence GEM) and not

genet

. So I guess you have to use a Raspberry Pi 4 if you want a native driver.

Hi,

Please help with the following problem. On PNCConf when I click the button Test/Tune Axis to test my X-axis, the following message appears:

[
You are using a simulated-realtime version of LinuxCNC, so testing/tuning of hardware is unavailable.
]

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN, PLEASE?

My environment is as follow:

Mesa 7I96S, power supply is MEAN-WELL MDR-10-5 ( 5V, 2A ).
7I96S IP is addres is 10.10.10.10, I can ping it. And PNCConf has been able to discover the card.

Computer: Raspberry PI 4B

Operating system: Debian Bookworm 12,
Kernel: "Linux picnc 6.6.59-rt45-v8-behai-rt-build+ #1 SMP PREEMPT_RT Sat Nov  2 10:20:46 AEDT 2024 aarch64 GNU/Linux"

PNCConf: BETA Version 1
LinuxCNC: 2.9.3

ONLY ONE closed-loop Nema23 driver CL57T: Which I configure to be the X-axis.

The wiring of CL57T to 7I96S is as below. This has been suggested by Mr. PCW.

[
7I96S       CL57T
+5V          PUL+
STEP0-    PUL-
+5V         DIR+
DIR0-      DIR-

CL57T's SW3 Set for 5V mode.
]

Even though I have only one motor and one driver, I still have to configure Y, tandem Y2 and Z axes as per the screenshot below:



On the X Motor page, clicking on the Test/Tune Axis button, the above mentioned message appears:



Please note: I built the kernel myself. I have also built LinuxCNC from the source myself back in November, 2024.

What have I done wrong, and how to fix it, please?

Thank you and best regards,

...behai.
 

Don't overthink it.
The drivers in Ethercat refer to optimised RT Ethernet NIC drivers. There is a generic driver we use and then some hardware specific ones for install and broadcom, I assumed there would be generic driver support.

I wonder about the drivers in the gnet folder for the RPi. Whether the drivers from 6.12.x kernel source need to be patched with the ethercat stuff and moved into the gnet folder.

unknown wrote:

rodw wrote:

. I'd get confirmation that the commit for 6.11 will work for 6.12.

It seems to be confirmed because the notes say it fixes issue #160 which is the issue I raised. 
gitlab.com/etherlab.org/ethercat/-/merge_requests/151

rodw wrote:

There is a commit pending with etherlab or the 6.11 kernel and up which also should let ethercat on 6.12 work for us.
Bjarne at etherlab is chasing it up for us internally. He has been so helpful for us along the way.
 

I had a look at the ethercat DKMS package (extracted the package in a temporary directory, no need to do an install), and what I saw is that the source of the modules have ending with 5.14 & 6.1 before the .c .h extension (I'm guessing these are the supported kernels). I'd get confirmation that the commit for 6.11 will work for 6.12.

jairobbo wrote:

Hello everyone,

I started to work with linuxcnc only a few weeks ago, when I decided to upgrade my 3d printer with A and B axis.
Because my pi4 was starting to jitter I acquired a pi5. As one does..

I etched the image 2.94 for pi5 to an SD card. Running this image, GPIO is not working.

halcmd loadrt hal_gpio help
Note: Using POSIX realtime
Invalid parameter `help'
<commandline>:0: waitpid failed /usr/bin/rtapi_app hal_gpio
<commandline>:0: /usr/bin/rtapi_app exited without becoming ready
<commandline>:0: insmod for hal_gpio failed, returned -1
cnc@raspberrypi:~$

I dont have the knowledge to troubleshoot this. Unfortunately. Maybe somebody here know how to solve this.

kind regards,
JAiro
 

halcmd loadrt hal_gpio help
Invalid parameter `help' <<<<< this is the error from the above, Linux is pretty verbose in telling you what is wrong.

But you really need to read the man page
linuxcnc.org/docs/devel/html/drivers/hal_gpio.html

 

There is a commit pending with etherlab or the 6.11 kernel and up which also should let ethercat on 6.12 work for us.
Bjarne at etherlab is chasing it up for us internally. He has been so helpful for us along the way.

hal_gpio uses a newer method that is meant to support other ARM hardware, not just the PI. Code changes at the kernel never stops!

The images provided are not generic Debian images, as generic Debian didn't support overlays.
The images we build are custom images based on Debian repo but with kernel sources from the RPi-Linux github.

The output I gave was showing that the hal_gpio driver does indeed work, the first line is loading the driver with the GPIO config as per the man page for the driver. Yes it was the current image, with the 6.12 series kernel & Linuxcnc 2.9.4.

Pardon me for not posting the errormessage encountered.
I was using hal_pi_gpio since I was under the impression from the forum that it is recommended for new projects.
Under "known bugs" on the man page it says:
*
At the moment (2023-07-16) this driver only seems to work on Raspbian as the generic Debian image does not set up the correct interfaces in /dev/gpiomem and restricts access to the /sys/mem interface.
*
The error message I got was related to access to /sys/mem. Since it was a known bug I did not save and post the error-message but instead tried going the Raspbian route.


I'm not sure what to make of your output from halrun but do you mean that you are successfully using GPIOs on a Rpi5 with hal_gpio and the downloaded "standard" img?
I'm not sure where I picked up that hal_pi_gpio was the way to go but if it works with hal_gpio I suppose that is the way to go. Thoughts?

Already built the Trixie image, just wanted to make sure there were no gotchas. Haven't added desktop yet, I'll do that when the base image boots from nvme drive on the Pi. Build the packages, put them up on github like before and build a full image.
Eventually this will need building once Trixie is officially released, might as well start checking if anything goes pear shaped.

I started with the most recent pull from pyavitz's repo and hoping that it's just the user script is needed to be slotted in and of course the userdata.txt I used for the Bookworm build. Oh and turn SPI on as default and just for myself as I'm probably the only one that uses midnight commander ditch the red & green defaults.

With regards to network manager, I really haven't noticed an issue with it on the RPi5 even with gnome network manager, reckon it's worth putting it in ? Another personal pref as it's easy to turn wifi on & off when needed.
Does this affect ethercat ?

Hello everyone,

I started to work with linuxcnc only a few weeks ago, when I decided to upgrade my 3d printer with A and B axis.
Because my pi4 was starting to jitter I acquired a pi5. As one does..

I etched the image 2.94 for pi5 to an SD card. Running this image, GPIO is not working.

halcmd loadrt hal_gpio help
Note: Using POSIX realtime
Invalid parameter `help'
<commandline>:0: waitpid failed /usr/bin/rtapi_app hal_gpio
<commandline>:0: /usr/bin/rtapi_app exited without becoming ready
<commandline>:0: insmod for hal_gpio failed, returned -1
cnc@raspberrypi:~$

I dont have the knowledge to troubleshoot this. Unfortunately. Maybe somebody here know how to solve this.

kind regards,
JAiro

You could also try installing Debian Trixie from the debian image now its available
raspi.debian.net/daily-images/

Note that this will not install a desktop, just a console but it will have a preempt_rt kernel available. I did do up a doc on doing this for Debian Bullseye which will basically be the same.

docs.google.com/document/d/1S0K-UBlXnsYC...b_0/edit?usp=sharing

The name for xfce package might have changed search the debian packages for XFCE to get the right name today.