Introduction and New Build

I suspect you may have a lemon RTAI wise

Here is a E8500 (in one of those $39 Ebay DC7800s)

freeby.mesanet.com/loaded-e8500-preempt-rt.png

This is after ~25 minutes with 25 glxgears running and 10 youtube flash videos
playing at once (with audio with networking over WIFI connection)

Hmm, so should I be trying preempt? I don't even know where to start.

Dmesg has one instance of "RTAPI: Error: Unexpected realtime delay on task 1"

So I pulled the trigger on the Pico purchase:

(4) BLDC motors
(1) Universal PWM controller
(4) BLDC drivers
(1) Brake board
(1) IEEE-1284 cable
(1) 12V supply

Once these items and a toroidal PSU are received, I can begin nailing down the volume requirements for the enclosure.

Anyone have experience with these Pico BLDC boards and what their heat generation would be if kept to the lower 50% of their power capacity? In other words, would ventilation and additional heat sink be required? I guess it would never be a bad idea to cool them anyway. Has anyone implemented temperature controlled fans in their control boxes?

Hunter wrote:

So I pulled the trigger on the Pico purchase:

(4) BLDC motors
(1) Universal PWM controller
(4) BLDC drivers
(1) Brake board
(1) IEEE-1284 cable
(1) 12V supply

Once these items and a toroidal PSU are received, I can begin nailing down the volume requirements for the enclosure.

Anyone have experience with these Pico BLDC boards and what their heat generation would be if kept to the lower 50% of their power capacity? In other words, would ventilation and additional heat sink be required? I guess it would never be a bad idea to cool them anyway. Has anyone implemented temperature controlled fans in their control boxes?

You probably do not need any cooling when used with the NEMA size 23 motors. We generally bolt the amps to an aluminum plate, that is about all you need.

Jon

Finally have Preempt running, however having issues with graphics driver and Gnome 3. Accidently installed Jesse yesterday, and really liked the LXDE desktop. Need to figure out how to get that on Wheezy.

Numbers are closer to 20us, with far fewer outliers. Will repost numbers after I sort out the graphics problems and run it through the paces.

Well I've tried to plug in both an E8500 and a Q9550, but have found that the particular version of my Dell motherboard (0DN075-70821-73K-50AX) is not compatible with CPUs outside of the Conroe family (FSB@1066MHz vs 1333MHz). For each cpu, the fan goes to 100% speed on both the CPU and the Graphics card with no beeps or post screen. Was hoping a BIOS update would add either one, but no luck. Will have to settle with the existing performance on this machine. The numbers I reported earlier were not not really a torture test on the system, now sitting at a peak latency of 55uS.

Multitasking capacity has been greatly reduced from RTAI, which I would expect given that latencies have improved. The latency test will only open about 4 GLXgear copies before the system will not allow other applications to load. Beyond this, I need to close one instance to open another. CPU load is 100% at this point.

Unless I find anything else to try with the CPUs I have, they will be available for sale as I have no need for them. 10$ and 40$ respectively.

Lost some ground this weekend by updating firmware for my GPU....back to 200us+ latencies.

I've moved the discussion to here is computers and OSs:

www.linuxcnc.org/index.php/english/forum...cision-390-build-log