On 2/25/2014 7:45 AM, Josiah Morgan wrote: > I noticed that xylotex has an fpga cape in the works for beaglebone black. > (as well as other similar items from other sources) > I was curious if anyone was looking into the implementation of such fpga > capes into a linuxcnc build. > also, what would be the benefits and drawbacks to the addition of this fpga > module? > has anyone thought about how linuxcnc would be able to actually take > advantage of the fpga capabilities? > I'm just curious because I could see some benefits of possibly allowing the > fpga to house the kinematics functions as well as drive multiple step pins > simultaneously. I just don't know how linuxcnc would command it. > anyway, I just wanted to bring this up for discussion and see what thoughts > people had on it.
I've got a logi-bone coming from the Kickstarter project, and will try and play with the Xylotex board when it becomes available. I'm also looking at modifying one of the parallel port Mesa cards to talk directly to the BeagleBone (vs. trying to do SPI or parallel port emulation with the PRU). With all of these, I suspect the easiest path to working systems will be to get the hostmot2 VHDL code running on the FPGA and modify the hm2 HAL driver to talk to them. It's all pretty straight-forward (says the guy who writes VHDL code for a living and ported the hm2 PCI driver to user-space). The general benefits would be the same as switching from software stepgen to a Mesa card on an x86 system, although perhaps not _quite_ as dramatic. The PRU can give you a 2-10x improvement over typical x86 software stepgen (1-10 uS threads vs. 10-25 uS or so), where the Mesa card is about a 500x improvement (or 20 nS "thread") assuming a 50 MHz clock. -- Charles Steinkuehler [email protected]
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