Advanced Search

Hi all, 
after swapping our Raspberry Pi4 with a 5 things didn't work anymore as they did before, and thanks to this forum, as far as I understood there is no SPI support yet, right? 
I have also read that "rodw" you have created an image builder, and "Cornholio" you managed to patch it so it works right?
As we are trying to run the mesa 7c80 with a Raspberry Pi5, is there an image available currently that supports this combination? If not what would be the steps to "patch" it together? 

Thanks a lot in advance 

With the 5A-75B and 5A-75E we have a low cost way of creating a driver board for Linux-CNC. Based on the work of Romanetz, the project  LiteX-CNC  was started, providing a easy customizable firmware and driver to use these boards. The down-side however is that these boards require some soldering work to be done to accept inputs; I've messed up some boards in the process....

Therefore, Litex-CNC is going to be expanded to accept more FPGA's, starting with the Sipeed Tang Nano 20k. Compared with the 5A-75B it has less outputs (28 compared to 48 for the 5A-75B), but this is still enough for a simple 3 axis machine. The big advantage is that no SMT soldering skills are required to get this board up and running.

For the Raspberry-Pi I've designed a HAT, which provides:

• 7 extended PMOD-connectors. Each connector has 4 GPIO, power rails (+5V, max 200 mA) and a buffered enable signal;
• RS489 connector for communicating with for example a VFD;
• communication between Raspberry PI and FPGA using SPI in bidirectional mode (3-wire) to save on pins;
• conforms to the HAT+ specification , including a EEPROM with settings.

With the PMOD-connectors one can easily connect to break-out boards providing stepgen, GPIO (12V/24V inputs and outputs), differential encoders, etc. I'm also working to provide support for shifting data out (74HC595) and in (74HC165).

An estimation of the HAT will be around 7 Euro's, excluding the Tang Nano 20k. Inlcuding the FPGA, the price would be around the 40 Euro price point.

I am new to LinuxCNC, so please forgive me if this has already been answered.  I searched and could not find it anywhere so am asking here.  (I always hate on other forums when people just jump in with questions before searching.)

I have a 7i92TH connected to a Raspberry Pi 5.  The use case for it is for rose engine lathes, and we need to drive a spindle + 7 axes.

The break-out board we are using for both 26-pin outputs from the 7i92TH was developed using the input from Peter.  Fundamentally, we will have

• 8 outputs to drivers, all with Step, Direction, & Enable
• 7+ inputs for limit switches

Peter W. got us setup with the files needed to program the 7i92TH, and that seems to be working as expected.  When I run

         mesaflash --device 7i92t --addr 192.168.1.121 --readhmid

the output matches the .pin file supplied by Peter, telling me that the mesaflash --write command worked to load the .bin file supplied by Peter.

When running pncconf:

• I've tried with copying the contents of the .pin file into the Input tab on the Help screen, and not doing this.
• I was able to successfully discover the 7i92TH board, and it populated the Output tab on the Help screen (I didn't check word-for-word, but it seems to be duplicate of the output from mesaflash --readhmid).

When I want to proceed forward, assigning the pins to axes, I encounter the screens I've attached.

ISSUE for which I'm seeking help:  I can't figure out how the Num items (pin numbers?) match up to the .pin file.  What am I missing?