Messages

1

SmoothStepper USB / Re: SmoothStepper firmware for LinuxCNC?

« on: October 31, 2012, 10:35:35 PM »

First off, thanks for the civil replies.  I half expected to get blasted out of the water for asking my question, and it's great to get 'real' answers instead.

Second, I get what you're saying about external motion control going against LinuxCNC dogma.  I am not actually myself a LinuxCNC user (yet), and its a bit disappointing to hear that they're so set in their ways.  I don't necessarily think that their way is 'wrong', but it would be nice if they'd support both realtime on the PC and on external motion control devices.

Back to my original question though; I'm still not hearing a 'no'   Probably sounding less likely, though

2

SmoothStepper USB / SmoothStepper firmware for LinuxCNC?

« on: October 31, 2012, 12:45:40 PM »

Please forgive that this post pertains to LinuxCNC, not Mach3 - this seems to be 'the' support forum for SmoothStepper, otherwise I'd post it on a non-Mach3-centric place if one was available.

Some folks have asked about running SS under LinuxCNC but the answer seems to be that the SS is set up as more of a buffer-type device than a real-time one.  This makes a lot of sense, but given that the SS is basically an FPGA with associated interface circuitry, could a custom firmware be written to support LinuxCNC's requirements?  LinuxCNC does currently support other FPGA products for interface.

It would be nice for those looking for USB- and Ethernet-based solutions for use with LinuxCNC, and if the necessary data was available it might get written by someone in the LinuxCNC community.

Documentation on LinuxCNC's requirements can be found here:

http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Emc2HardwareDesign

You'll notice that it says that nobody has yet written drivers that use the rtlinux Ethernet or USB stacks, but it also doesn't definitely say it won't work, either.

Thanks