Confused about hardware to get

Had a quick look at GRBLHal. I couldn't find anything that says it supports cutter radius compensation or a pendant with a MPG. These are must haves for me if changing at all from standard Grbl on the Arduino. If it is there can you point me to it as I can't find it. All I could find was the list of supported G-code which didn't include G41/G42

github.com/grblHAL/core

Well, right or wrong, I ordered a WHB04-4 wireless pendant for this endeavor. I plan to set it up in simulator mode to play with it a bit.

As for the mesa card, I will likely order that in October since I won't be in town from the 18th to the 2nd for vacation. It still looks to me like the 7i96 is the way to go.

Thanks again for the help so far. I'm sure I will have more questions as time goes on.

I had a look too, it does support up to 2 mpg wheels I guess a lathe can use 2? Also found the tool's tables in a top tab. But I let fusion handle cutter comp myself, I've only used it for cutter wear comp if needed. but it does look like it has it. ill have to pull out an old esp board and try it. but if you are good with Linux then you can't go wrong with linuxcnc. it's awsome

So while I have the RPi as a possibility, I also dug around in my pile of stuff and also have a ASUS Eee Box 1036 pc. The specs on this little machine are as follows:

• Intel® Celeron® J1900 quad-core 2GHz SoC processor (2M Cache, up to 2.42 GHz)
• 3- USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB 3.0 port
• Intel HD Graphics with VGA and HDMI Ports
• Ethernet port
• COM Port
• Integral WIFI 802.11 B/G/N
• 2GB RAM
• 320GB SATA HDD
• Card reader

ASUS Eee Box EB1036 - mini desktop PC - Celeron J1900 2 GHz - 2 GB - HDD 320 GB Specs - CNET

Would this also be a suitable candidate for LinuxCNC?

2gb is a bit low but should still work.
The main factor is latency, you would need to run a few tests.

Also know that there are bios tweaks one can do to improve latency.
Some internal gpus are good some are not.

Give it a shot and see what results you get.

The J1900 should be OK though you may need to disable the on card WIFI
(and use a USB/WIFI dongle if you need WIFI)

I got LinuxCNC installed on the Eee Box. Haven't changed any settings or disabled wifi yet, but how it is now is pathetic. The base thread jitter was over 20,000,000 after about a minute. I may play with it some more but it looks like the RPi is my best bet. Is there a way to disable the wifi in Linux? Do I have to yank the card? Probably will play with it a bit just to see what it does. I know it has to be below 1,000,000 ns to even remotely be a candidate and there is a really long way to go to get there.

That's probably expected if you do not disable all power saving options in the BIOS
(including any speed switching, C states above C1 etc)

Also do not use a base thread in the test, it will not be used by LinuxCNC
and the default base thread period (25 usec) is _way_ too short for the Eee
to handle.

I would run:

latency-histogram --nobase --sbinsize 1000

After disabling all power management options in the BIOS, and post the result here

Thanks. I will definitely give that a try on the EEE box.

I've been playing with the RPi in simulator mode, anxiously awaiting the pendant arrival. In the meantime, I have been doing more research. First, the mesa card. I think I have settled on the 7i92 as it has a DB25 interface that will plug in directly to the parallel port BOB the machine has right now. This will allow keeping the Arduino with Grbl as a backup.

I also found the link about the Orange Pi forum.linuxcnc.org/18-computer/39037-lin...pi-allwincnc?start=0 which sounds like it would fit my needs without a mesa card. I could make up a cable to go between the Orange Pi I/O pins and the DB25 on the BOB, giving the same benefit of keeping the currently working Arduino around. Since I like to tinker, I am getting ready to order an Orange Pi to play with. We'll see how that goes but I always have the RPi/Mesa to fall back on.

So the pendant came today and I'm trying to get it to work in simulator mode on the RPi. Here is what I did so far to try this.

1. I tested the pendant in standalone mode using the command "xhc-whb04-6 -ue" and everything seems to work in there.
2. Used stepconfig to make a new sim machine called Pendant_Test
3. The Sim machine was tested to make sure it ran before further modifications.
4. The Pendant_Test.hal file and ini file were modified by adding the hal configuration example from here: raw.githubusercontent.com/LinuxCNC/linux...ple-configuration.md
The ini only got the stuff at the top of that file.
5. created the file described here linuxcnc.org/docs/2.8/html/man/man1/xhc-whb04b-6.1.html#UDEV

when I try to run LinuxCNC, it fails with the following debug info:

Debug file information:
./Pendant_Test.hal:50: Pin 'halui.machine.is-on' does not exist
4130
Stopping realtime threads
Unloading hal components
Note: Using POSIX realtime

Can somone help me?