Thanks for answer. What I had in mind was little different. I was not thinking about clone in everything but only in function. I was actually thinking about using the ARM part of the SoC to function as a kind of bridge. So the initialization of FPGA would not come from the controller but from something running on the ARM itself. Maybe two Machinekits, one running on standard x86 computer with user interface, trajectory planner and so on, LPT/Serial used for non realtime machine data (I have power/voltage/health monitor), and some bastardized version of Machinekit running as slave on the ARM doing the communication with parent Machinekit. Maybe with Machinetalk? (I am not that far into my study of Machinekit.)
My main idea was to avoid programming FPGA as I am complete green at this. On Tuesday, December 20, 2016 at 2:49:40 PM UTC+1, Charles Steinkuehler wrote: > > On 12/19/2016 6:10 PM, [email protected] <javascript:> wrote: > > Hi, > > when we are talking about FPGA cards and closing servo loops in them, is > it > > possible to use this SoC board as a Mesa I/O card7I80DB? So as to > connect it by > > ethernet to i386 PC Machinekit controller. > > > > I have been thinking about FPGA combo (back then PCI based) for long > time but > > was completely turned off Mesa by how they conduct business and > unfortunately > > these is no viable competition. > > > > I know that I would still have to solve somehow the 7i77 side but that's > for > > another day. > > I suppose it would be possible to turn one of the SoC+FPGA boards into > a 7I80DB clone, but it wouldn't be easy. The 7I80 FPGA logic is open > source, but it uses a custom CPU built from FPGA gates for the IP > stack, and it expects to talk to the specific embedded Ethernet > controller chip used on the Mesa board. Worse, the Ethernet ports on > all the SoC+FPGA dev kit boards I am aware of are tied to the ARM > processor side, not the FPGA fabric, so you would have a difficult > time getting the 7I80 code running. > > You would also pretty much be throwing away the entire ARM side of the > SoC+FPGA board. You'd probably be better off starting with a more > traditional FPGA only dev. kit if you're wanting to mimic one of the > Mesa Ethernet cards. > > -- > Charles Steinkuehler > [email protected] <javascript:> > -- website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github: https://github.com/machinekit --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Machinekit" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/machinekit. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
