On 11/02/2014 09:18 AM, John Alexander Stewart wrote: > Can someone tell me what the eventual plans for Machinekit and LinuxCNC is? > > Are the two forks going to come together again? > > I really like LinuxCNC, and I really like the idea of small, embedded CNC > controllers, so I'm just wondering. (I have been loosely following the > machine kit google group; maybe the answer is obvious, but I've missed it) > > There are not complete forks, never to share code again. A large part of the reason for the fork, as I understand it, was to break free from the constraints of NML and its dependence on shared memory, with the only alternative of massive overhead when sending the entire memory block across the net every servo period.
The machinekit folks have their own system for doing this, enabling them to break parts of LinuxCNC to run on different hosts over the net. I think there is some disagreement on how this was done, and so the LinuxCNC group is doing this a different way, that they think will be more flexible. I REALLY do not know all the details of this. But, the machinekit folks have their scheme working, apparently, and the LinuxCNC way is not ready yet, I think. Also, the machinekit runs with a Xenomai kernel on the Beagle Bone, and with the assist from Charles Steinkuehler's PRU code for step generation, etc. it works quite well. You can't get much smaller than that! I have not run a machine with the beagle/machinekit, but build CRAMPS boards (Also Charles' design) and it all seems to work. I just ssh -X into the Beagle, so I have not explored the concept of running the GUI on a different CPU. If I was running a real machine, the GUI latency might be bothersome. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
