-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2/1/2013 3:45 PM, Gregory Perry wrote: > Can LinuxCNC run as a simple userland process which talks to a > hardware servo controller (such as the Mesa card you mention)? Or > maybe more to the point, is there a standard API with LinuxCNC > that will treat a servo control board as a simple device that it > outputs gcode to? I am thinking this is where the Python/PRU > interfacing would come into play, in other words LinuxCNC would > treat Python/PRU as the equivalent of a hardware servo control > card? I don't think that would be very hard to implement at all, > the majority of the complexity with the PRU to date has been the > PRU assembly language but if the PRUs can be flashed with firmware > from Python (which now it can) then adding gcode translation to > that process shouldn't be that complex. > > I apologize in advance if these are newbie questions, I don't have > any familiarity with LinuxCNC but I've been following the > EMC/BeagleBone/Xenomai integration effort for a while now.
I'm not really sure. In most setups, LinuxCNC is processing the gcode and running a servo motion loop, which requires feedback and good latency timing. I'm not sure if you could get LinuxCNC to run 'blind', where the Linux side code could run with some sort of artificial feedback and collect up a series of motion points that you could feed to something like the PRU for conversion into steps. I believe this is more like how Mach works, which is why it can run with things like USB motion controller boards (that have horrible latency issues if you're trying to read back real-time position). Given everything that's possible with HAL, it's probably possible to implement this form of control. I'm not aware of anyone who's actually done so, but that doesn't mean it's not possible or even already done. I am fairly new to the LinuxCNC world myself. - -- Charles Steinkuehler char...@steinkuehler.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlEMOXsACgkQLywbqEHdNFyPYQCg6fBTorDLd8pyej31hGOtKZuS XOUAoKJ/tJivug11y17GM8vb8I1BlkMZ =pZwx -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_jan _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
