LinuxCNC-RIO - RealtimeIO for LinuxCNC based on FPGA (ICE40 / ECP5)

MaxEkb77 wrote:

encoder component ?

 

what you mean ?
i using this encoder:
www.amazon.de/gp/product/B08PDLFKBM/ref=..._title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

the hal component is inside the rio driver

its in a new branch: g33

and there are maybe problems with the free toolchain,
i used the original gowin tools for this

I see in sources component encoder (vin_quadencoderz).
ohh need test all

I recently stumbled upon this topic- looks really impressive project. I'm currently building a milling machine and was planning on using linuxcnc and mesa, however this looks a tempting alternative for my use case.

I'm not afraid from building the needed electronics and fiddling with building the gateware as I have some leftover Colorlight ecp5 modules, have experience with open source fpga tools (though, with LiteX/amaranth, very rudimentary verilog knowledge), and have another cnc machine planned, so the work would be amortised over more than a single machine.

My main question would be: what might I be missing out by using this instead of mesa? Are there known features not implemented yet (I think my needs are rather modest: up to 5 step/dir axes up to 6 incremental encoders, digital inputs/outputs). I'm not really sure where the closed motion control loop is being executed usually- is it Linuxcnc, or does mesa have support to do closed loop stepgen in hardware (which doesn't seem to be supported here, right?)

Hi fest,
thanks
I don't have any mesa cards, so I can't tell you what's missing.
But if you miss something, let me know and I'll try to add it.
I think mesa also uses the pid controllers in linuxcnc.

About the colorlight boards i have to say that the networkport is not supported, you need 4 free pins for SPI and either a UDP2SPI bridge or a raspberry.

5 step/dir axes up to 6 incremental encoders should be no problem if you have enough pins.

EDIT: do you know this project ?: forum.linuxcnc.org/27-driver-boards/4442...roller-board?start=0

Hmm, thanks for the pointer, LiteXCNC also looks quite interesting. Direct Ethernet support is indeed intriguing, though it also appears that IO options are more limited in LiteXCNC.

The modules I have are SODIMM, with FPGA, SDRAM and 2x GigE phy, not the boards with LED buffers, so pin availability is not a problem. I'll probably design my carrier board to be compatible with both projects (so far it seems that LinuxCNC-RIO only needs an SPI header while LitexCNC needs the phy) and see what works best for me.