I’ve got MachineKit running on a Beagle Bone Black to control my Denford Triac milling machine. It still works brilliantly and has done so since at least 2012.
I don’t understand why the project seems to have died. Was it just that the developers moved on and it fell by the wayside or was there a technical reason?
My version dates back to before the HAL and CNC was split in to two different repos. I’d love to build an up-to-date version but don’t know whether that’s feasible now nor where to start.
You might be right Michael although I struggle to understand why the RasPi is preferable since you then need to have a separate, and quite expensive, board to generate the step and directions signals. The BBB can generate those onboard using one of the two very capable co-processors. Is it because of PiMania?
I own at least four beaglebones and the two 200MHz PRUs are really neat.
But you can buy a Pi and a board capable of running Remora for about the cost of a beaglebone, and the main CPU has a lot more power.
No hardware investment has gone into the beagle platform for years, but the pi ecosystem, including non-raspberry variants, sees frequent innovation.
My understanding was that the whole point of machinekit was that the LinuxCNC developers previously refused to accept work for any non-x86 processor. I haven’t looked because I decided to use Remora, but I am curious whether the PRU support was brought back to LinuxCNC after their change of mind?
Fair enough Michael, perhaps I need to just accept MachineKit has been great and move on now. I was having a little look at Remora last night with this in mind. I’d definitely want to use an open source solution though and I see there is some experimentation with ESP32 to work with Remora which is interesting so I might dig further in to that when time allows.
Edit:
One extra thought, my experience with the BBB is that the SD card has never caused me a problem whereas my experience with many RasPis is that I’ve had multiple SD card failures…