Remora - Rpi Software Stepping Using External Microcontroller via SPI

Gusgus wrote:

Hi again and thanks for all the help up until now!

I wan't to give more context and explain myself better, we have been using this cnc router since 2023, originally setup with a raspberry pi 3b and octopus pro combo, it has worked wonders and is amazing the only real issue is that the raspberry pi 3b was slow. Recently we made the change to a raspberry pi 5, we took the original .ini and .hal files which we then update to be compatible with the new remora version, we kept the same config.txt file. We installed the linuxcnc-raspberrypi5 image and installed the remora components as instructed in the documentation.

The issues we've seen: when we first loaded linuxcnc and ran the .ini file by double clicking on it and choosing linuxcnc as the app to run the ini file we then saw the raspberry pi 5 using rp1 driver alert, we initially thought this was error but figured this was just an alert and so continued. We then started testing leaving e stop we could but just for a moment, no more than 3s, we could even get to enable but non of the drivers actually enable. We then tested if this was the E-stop's fault but we assumed it wasn't since if we disconnected the estop we could exit estop at all, wehn it was properly setup we could but can't enable the steppers fisically. This isn't a stepper issue or driver issue since they get enabled with the raspberry pi 3.

Thanks in advance and thank you for all of the help until now! Oh and sorry for any grammar or spelling mistakes, english isn't our first tounge.

Ok, so I pulled out my octopus board and RPi5 to see what could be the issue. I found my working config and noted:

#SERVO_PERIOD = 1000000
SERVO_PERIOD = 5000000

Making this change to your config, I got it up and running. With the faster servo period the board was throwing so many communication errors.

Sorry, forgot to mention updated hal line as well to set the SPI speed to 2Mhz, the default 20Mhz is probably the issue.

loadrt remora-spi SPI_num=0 CS_num=0 SPI_freq=2000000