lcnc on Olinuxino

[ehj666]

This is a fork on the "Xenomai for A13-A10 thread" specifically talking about porting Linuxcnc to the Olinuxino. Picking up with this post from uMinded:

I did not try any of the GUI's as I run headless and the core HAL functionality is the main goal.

As for the Oli not being fast enough that's kind of the whole point of this Xenomai on A13 project! If you just need simple gcode to movements then the RepRap project and arduino have that covered, if you want LinuxCNC and HAL then theirs SPI PIC32 addons for the Rasberry PI already developed. However both of these are only capable of around 30kHz step generation. Given my numbers I have tested with I think I can get at least 31KHz worst case.

I will start a new thread for LinuxCNC on the Oli.

How the heck did you get it to compile headless? I have been trying to do that for years as all of my configurations currently run headless with a remote GUI anyway. I kept running into dependency issues, particularly with languages / locales, which in the end would somehow tie back to xorg. Granted I have not tried in a couple of years. I have also wanted to break HAL out into its own stand-alone package to use separate from lcnc.

Both are on the lcnc idea whiteboard here:
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Lncnc_3_Idea_Whiteboard#Core_LinuxCNC_running_headless

As for the choice of the Olinuxino, it is the packaging that got my interest. The Arduino reprap still needs a computer dedicated to it to feed the G-Code and the LCD-TS display is nicer than anything I have found for the Pi. So for me, the ability to directly drive stepper signals is a bonus, not a requirement.

[otto_pjm]

Very interested in this one, it would be great if the GPIO could be updated fast enough to use directly.

Thanks for all the great work that has gone into this. I'm not sure I can contribute meaningfully, but I'd be happy to test code. Does it matter if I get the A13-OLINUXINO-MICRO or the A13-OLINUXINO-WIFI to run the builds on?

Pete

[ehj666]

Does it matter if I get the A13-OLINUXINO-MICRO or the A13-OLINUXINO-WIFI to run the builds on?

For development purposes, you will definitely want the wifi. For just running lcnc I suspect 256MB of memory might be a bit light, but we shall see. A network interface of some sort is certainly advantageous, if only to transfer G-Code files.

[uMinded]

I did not see this thread when I created my own. See HERE

In that thread I describe how I compiled LinuxCNC v2.5 without issues and as of today a very basic HAL driver so you can toggle the green LED on our boards.

If you are running headless the micro has no problems keeping up as I am barley using any memory to run HAL however when I am compiling I usually have less than 10mb left over !! If you want anything graphical at all then you need the Wifi version as Xorg will suck up at least 200mb my itself and the mali wants 64mb too.