Jetson Nano as LinuxCNC driver

It runs Linux, has a bunch of GPIO's and appears to be faster than snot.

It would be really cool if there was a project to port LinuxCNC to the Nano. Sadly I'm not qualified to do it, but I'm hoping to drum up some interest since NewEgg only has one or 2 motherboards with native parallel ports available

It looks very promising until it dawns on me that Nvidia does a lot of power saving on everything and they tend to do it properly ( looking at you, AMD ).
I would order it right now to play with it, but i can not due to customs not playing nice here.

DougM wrote: It runs Linux, has a bunch of GPIO's and appears to be faster than snot.

It would be really cool if there was a project to port LinuxCNC to the Nano. Sadly I'm not qualified to do it, but I'm hoping to drum up some interest since NewEgg only has one or 2 motherboards with native parallel ports available

Parallel ports are just one of many ways to interface LinuxCNC to your hardware. And the worst way.

There are lots of PCI and Ethernet options.

andypugh wrote: Parallel ports are just one of many ways to interface LinuxCNC to your hardware. And the worst way.

Actually, GPIO from a synchronous von Neumann architecture is the best idea, but the "way" to it has been clouded and crippled by modern CPU architecture featuring non-von Neumann "improvements", and not providing standard GPIO other than the corrupt and obsolete implementation of parallel ports.

The founding principle and ideal of LinuxCNC is that one computer does it all. The software is free, the computers get better and cheaper, the future is happy!

It's a technical tragedy that you can buy a motherboard with 100s of millions of transistors, but you can't do what you want with them. The hackery of a BIOS or Intel Management Engine owns the real time. You have to add another board, that amounts to another computer, with 1/1000 the complexity and 1000 times the price/transistor to fix that.

Something like the Jetson Nano might give back control of these factors, if you can control the GPUs or cores. But figuring that out will be a huge effort.

I miss the days of Multibus and ISA.

Richard J Kinch wrote: I miss the days of Multibus and ISA.

I don't !
To much fiddling to make it work.
While we are at it, Token Ring anyone ?

Token Ring, wow, you are no more the joungest in class?
Haven't heard that since years...

"Fiddeling" about parport trasscripting is only the half way
and you are better off with a real fpga pci parort card

For 10$ there is nothing that can do realtime IO! Nothing.
So i do like parallel ports, a lot, especially since the time USB got introduced and it was more trouble than it was actually worth. Had to work a lot with printers and scanners, at that time i would avoid USB like the plague ! Parallel port worked always.
And when i had to copy 40 or 50 MB of stuff on Floppy disks, that was miserable till i found some DOS software that used parallel port for data transfer from PC to PC, it was fast a reliable and never failed ! <<< This was way before USB existed.

Full disclosure I worked for Nvidia for 7+ years, left there in 2016.

My experience with the Nvidia parts has been pretty good with interrupt handling, so it looks like a good candidate. The GPIOs should be good for mutli-megahertz operation. I have pre-ordered one of the dev kits. I'm seeing an unstuffed battery clip on the back of the processor board, so I'm interested to see if there is an RTC supported on the board - may be in the SoC...

Should the onboard GPIO not be effective, there is an M.2 E-key slot which can be pulled out to a full-size x4 PCI-e slot with an adapter .

Unlike the RPi (even the 3 B+), the GPU on this should be able to wipe the floor with other SBCs for OpenGL support - but we'll see if the memory limitation of 4GB is going to kill us.

I have a Bridgeport Series 1 J-head I've been meaning to convert to CNC, with a tilt/rotate stage (5-axis). That'll be the target platform. NEMA42 4800oz-in @ 72V with Trinamic 10K-ppr encoders - just need Gecko to come out with a stepper+encoder drive...

Just ordered an x86 Atomic Pi....see how that goes, if it doesn't work out it seems to run Kodi ok

It does have ethernet on board connected to the PCIe bus and the SPI bus is expose as well.

Anyone have fun with 10BASE2 network and a boss that liked to make dodgy cables ?