On 3/30/2017 5:14 PM, Simon Mali wrote: > Hello all > A few questions: > @Charles Steinkuehler: you have said following: /For any serious machines, > it's > hard to beat a mini-itx motherboard and a low-end FPGA card/. Which low-end > FPGA > card do you recommend for this task? And are supported from machinekit or/and > Mach3 software.
Any of the cards from Mesa.net. Which board(s) is/are best depends on the physical machine you are hooking it to (both the PC and the CNC machine). You want a Mesa card that connects to your PC (via PCI, PCIe, or parallel-port) and depending on your CNC, you may need daughter cards for +/- 10V, encoders, or whatever. > I belive that at some point in the future also Machinekit will be a mature > software product cleaned from different bugs. What I like with this solution > with BBB is that you remove different computer hardware from the equation. We > know how many variations exists and problems with drivers came out of this. > You > have one hardware this is BBB and one software this is Machinekit. The biggest limitation of the BBB is it's weak graphics since the GPU is not (easily) supported. Again, a low-end PC with a PCI/PCIe Mesa card can be readily replaced or upgraded if it dies and will far surpass the BBB in performance (for both GPU and general floating-point) for a small amount of additional investment. IMHO the BBB mostly makes sense where size is a critical factor. My machines running on the BBB are mostly desktop scale 3D printers or smaller (I have an EggBot printer that's smaller than a shoe-box). I run larger machines (like my 5-axis robot arm) on x86 hardware. Also, if size is critical and you need the performance of FPGA assisted motion control (and can deal with poor or no graphics), the SoC+FPGA (from Altera or Xilinx, see the Machinekit mksocfpga project on github) works well. -- Charles Steinkuehler [email protected] -- 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.
