Agreed on the massive requirements disparity. In my view, given how saturated the market is for stepper-motor based control boards (particularly the Duet 3, which can be controlled by a BBB/RPi) I'd prefer a more Break-out-Board style cape to make industrial-level control more accessible.
My ideal cape would have dual etherCAT RJ45 ports, an RS422 or 485 header with voltage selection for PLC/spindle vfd control, UART headers, dual CAN headers and a small array of optoisloators for the other GPIO. Biggest problem for this is the ethercat license, which is somewhat of a pain... I also prefer the web-based GUIs locally hosted on the device, which can be accessed across the network and use less resources than a driven display and a native GUI, so I'd prefer a cape NOT be limited by a desire to have a screen/monitor from the BBB. just my 2C On Sunday, June 7, 2020 at 12:46:01 AM UTC-4, Malte Schmidt wrote: > > I think the issue is always that the requirements with these machines are > very different and that you never quite get what is needed. > > When I build the cape I use on my lathe I sort of used a modular design. I > based this on a prototype cape and used those small optocoupler and level > shift modules that you get from China for the maker scene. It looks quite > like a hack but you might see the three opto modules in the back and the > two level shifters here: > https://forum.zerspanungsbude.net/download/file.php?id=188366&mode=view > There is an external pwm-> 0-10V module as well (not shown) for spindle > control > > I always thought about making this nicer. I would have done it this way: > A cape that: > - Make PRU and GPIO Pins available in sets of 4? pins on standardized PIN > headers + power. > - Makes the terminals for connecting the cables available > > PLUS > > Small modules for level shift, opto isolation , spindle control (as > desired). These would use the standardized connectors on the cape. > For this I would actually rely on stuff that is already available (if so). > > -- 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]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/machinekit/4e75a7ba-b13f-4579-a7f1-09211ff4cbd7o%40googlegroups.com.
