Extending the I/O for a 3/4 Axis CNC/3Dprinter - Pocket Beagle

[Deepankar Maithani]

Hello   I am a GSoC applicant for 2020.  I am working on a Bidirectional Bus to extend the  available i/o . My target is to use the Enhanced  PRU GPIO  and use a universal shift register with it . And use remoteproc for the communication between the main processor and PRU.During the discussions in the GSoC forum i came across machinekit.io and one of the member told me that somebody in the machinekit.io community discussed that they wish there could be more i/o . I want to know from the community if having more i/o will  open new possibilities for the Machine.io community? I am also planning  to build a cape based on this bidirectional bus design that would allow easy access to the bus, possibly i would be designing a cape for PocketBeagle . I think this could even bring the overall price down for a CNC/ 3D printer based on Beaglebone platform.    So i seek the comments and suggestions from the community about how you feel about this idea. My complete proposal can be read in detail  here

Thanks

[Jason Kridner]

Let me try to make the question to the group a bit simpler:

If we were to use the PRUs to expand the parallel I/O capability of a PocketBeagle, is that useful and what would be the system interface?

One example of this being done is in something like the PocketScroller, which uses series of shift registers to control massive arrays of LEDs through on cheap HUB75 panels. That gives you an idea of what the performance and extensibility could be like.

So, what would be a rational way to expose this sort of thing to the Machinekit software? Linux driver? DDR ring buffer?

Of course, the above doesn't really give you much of a feel for what can be done on the input side. The scope of the project has been meant to be bi-directional, not just parallel output.

The BeagleLogic project gives a good idea of parallel capture capabilities, though here we are focused on augmenting the stream with shift registers.

Perhaps today Machinekit looks at the PRUs as just a way to dump stepper pulses out, but is there a reasonable way to augment it to include more generic parallel I/O?

On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 3:31 AM Deepankar Maithani <deepank...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello   I am a GSoC applicant for 2020.  I am working on a Bidirectional Bus to extend the  available i/o . My target is to use the Enhanced  PRU GPIO  and use a universal shift register with it . And use remoteproc for the communication between the main processor and PRU.During the discussions in the GSoC forum i came across machinekit.io and one of the member told me that somebody in the machinekit.io community discussed that they wish there could be more i/o . I want to know from the community if having more i/o will  open new possibilities for the Machine.io community? I am also planning  to build a cape based on this bidirectional bus design that would allow easy access to the bus, possibly i would be designing a cape for PocketBeagle . I think this could even bring the overall price down for a CNC/ 3D printer based on Beaglebone platform.    So i seek the comments and suggestions from the community about how you feel about this idea. My complete proposal can be read in detail  here

Thanks

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