The reality that you are using a Pi4 or an AMD motherboard from 2005 to 2019 is
then just not really important.
It's what's between that and the mechanicals and it's not the Pi4. It's MESA.
An OrangePi may only be around for a couple of years. Then discontinued.
Maybe in 20 years I won't care. But I really don't want to be changing out my
hardware every 2 or 3 years.
For stepper powered open loop mechanical systems no Mesa hardware is
required in between the x86 PC or the Orange pi and the stepper drivers.
You can use Mesa in between if you wish or require very high step rates
or much more IO, etc. You just need to make a wise choice for the x86 PC.
Mesa FPGA's are typically used with x86 PC's for closed loop/servo systems.
The Orange Pi's (there are numerous versions) have been available for
over 5 years. They mostly use the Allwinner ARM soc's that have the
integrated microcontrollers. Some versions use the Rockchip ARM SOC's
that also has an integrated microcontroller. The boards all have the
standard Rpi header IO pinout.
The Allwinner ARM soc's go back about 8-9 years now. There has been a
big open source group that has been involved with the Linux support and
also opening up of the mali GPU drivers.
https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page
They are not a flash in the pan and should be around for at least
another decade. What is more of a concern with ARM is its possible sale
to nvidia. That could possibly put a damper on future openness for ARM.
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