BeagleBone Black + MachineKit Testing

This project will document the efforts made to use MachineKit to run a CNC lathe with a full control panel.

Greg Duckworth

Following Follow project

Liked Like project

Become a Hackaday.io member

Just one more thing

To make the experience fit your profile, pick a username and tell us what interests you.

OK, I'm done! Skip

Similar projects worth following

View Gallery

Description

MachineKit is a fork of LinuxCNC and has been modified in a few important ways. It is my understanding that the MachineKit people have chosen to support only one specific real-time kernel and there have been optimizations made for special hardware.

The BeagleBone Black is a cool single board computer with a very special CPU. The main ARM chip is not blazingly fast but the two 200MHz Programmable Realtime Units (PRU's) make this bit of kit really special. Some very clever person/people managed to make a plug in for MachineKit which makes use of these realtime units for Step and Direction signal generation. This basically makes the output jitter-free.

This coupled with the general availability of the BBB, the extra pins available over a parallel port and the miniature size of the thing, has persuaded me to build a full CNC control system out of it. It can even do 5 Axis control if you want.

Details

This project will take a standard BBB and add components and software until it can control a CNC lathe. I will attempt to properly document everything but no promises are made about how successful you will be if you try to copy me. That being said, I am always happy to help and I will answer any questions I can.

The components will be detailed and hopefully we end up with a working machine :D