Category: Installing LinuxCNC
Any issues related to the Linuxcnc code is well reported thru the github channels.
Lists and the like on the forum don’t really work as, I mentioned before, users think that their problem is unique to themselves.
We started a thread a while back to gather issues related to Parallel Port cards. Every so often within a month 3 to 4 users will start a new thread with the same issues.
Apart from not having a SPI driver for the RPi5, due to the RP1 chip (which caused issues for many utilities in general use for accessing gpio on the RPi 4 and below) there is no real issue.
There was a big push at the end of 2023 to update the existing RPi images and create one for the RPi5, Rod worked hard on that and bounced a few ideas around with myself. Now it’s at a stage where it is quite mature and very usable. The only real “issue” is that the RPi imager utility cant be used with it for reasons discussed in this thread with the solution.
So far the hm2_spix driver works quite well and the gent who wrote it made some code changes to the original hm2_rpspi driver.
Once new packages are built I’m sure the RPI5 will be fully supported “out of the box” for it does require building Linuxcnc from the current code base for either the master branch or the 2.9 branch. Not a difficult task if one follows the instructions as set out in the docs.
Every cnc machine is different so one can not hope to have a plug and play solution unless one buys a cnc machine that has been preconfigured by the manufacturer.
There are many boards available from Mesa that people use for a variety of applications. On top of that there are a number or alternative projects Remora and Linuxcnc-RIO are just 2.
Myself I’ve taken a different path by using a Spartan 6 dev board, designing some boards that take care of level shifting and built firmware to suit using the Mesa sources, for some of the firmware I’ve tweaked the existing drivers to suit the IO config. Using the same hardware I can also use firmware from the Linuxcnc-RIO project.
There’s a lot of choice available.
