I recently returned from the linuxcnc meeting, where I did a presentation on remora. the reception was very good, there where a lot of very smart people who where all very supportive. Thank you everyone for your time and support, and thanks to Tormach for hosting the event. There was a lot of interest from the group, especially in the ethernet department.
One of the things on the agenda for the presentation, Ive uploaded a repo for using a Nucleo64 F446 with the red grbl shield. This is a big step in accessibility, as these board combo can be found for under $25. The other thing I like, is we are basically upgrading/upcycling the grbl shield to do things it could not do under grbl, like 4 axis, closed loop steppers, and highspeed encoders.
The repo came together using parts from other users, like flexi-hal for their static configuration, and user FelixFees on github for his spi2 option. Those 2 parts made the whole thing come together nicely. The static configuration for the nucleo is somewhat basic at the moment, and more modules need to be added. But for the time being, it has 4 stepgens and 3 inputs for limits.
I have some rough explanation in the repo here
github.com/cakeslob/Remora/tree/nucleo_static
This is the SPI2 pin diagram. It is a placeholder until I make better docs.
Another thing I have been working on is using the nucleo with those cheap chinese arduino ethernet shields. This would increase accessibility by much more as RPI is hard to get at the moment. This configuration is nice because there is an SD card included in the shield. There is somewhat of a pin conflict when trying to stack the ethernet shield with grbl shield on top. It requires some physical pin relocation, using jumpers. It is a minor inconvenience, but I will fully document it when the time comes. Although the SPI to ethernet branch is still in development, I will soon upload the repo/firmware for this development for anyone who is looking to play with it.
The grbl shield configuration will physically look like this, similar to what user gtt38 is using.
