How to start with a beaglebone

Hello everybody,

in the next weeks my new mill will arrive and in the meantime I want to think about a solution how to control it.
LinuxCNC is already set so far. I have here an older standard PC to get some first hands-on experiences and to configure LinuxCNC. But this is supposed to be a temporary solution only because these PCs simply need a lot of place and are fault-prone because of all the milling dust which comes into the case.
So long term I plan to switch to the beagle bone in an own case. I read already a lot and found a few good pages which explain a bit how to use the beagle bone but what I'm totaly missing are the essentials how-to. Maybe you can help me here a bit?

Do I -need- a cape for the beagle bone or are the provided GPIOs good enough? I plan to use a 3-axis with some sensors and a pwm controlled spindle
Connecting oldschool a PC via LPT is easy but how do I wire the beagle bone with my controler which expects a LPT connection ? Is there a standard setting included when using a provided image like the one from machinekit.io ?
There are several beagle bones at the market but which one should be chosen ?

Regards
Andreas Schafferloh

Hi,

You need to go over to the Machinekit site
www.machinekit.io
and the forum which it links to.
groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/machinekit

Linuxcnc does not support ARM, so you would have to build everything yourself.

Machinekit, which is a fork of Linuxcnc, has pre-built Xenomai images especially for BBB and a lot of expertise in the membership using BBB and capes

regards