Controller

CNC Controller

This CNC controller is an expansion board for LinuxCNC. See the electronics section for the RPi GPIO expansion board suitable for use with LinuxCNC using the configuration.

The PCB is an opto-isolation IO expansion board featuring:

• 16 Opto-isolated outputs (With indicator LED)
• 8 opto-isolated inputs (With indicator LED)
• 2 0-10V analogue outputs connected to two of the opto-isolated outputs

KiCAD Parts Library

This project relies on my KiCAD parts library. So you will need to also clone a copy of my KiCAD parts library.

Then, you can tell KiCAD where to find the parts library by creating a new environment variable called KICAD_BJS_KICAD_PARTS and set the value to the path to the parts library.

If you get the value or variable name wrong you'll see a lot of missing symbols in the project.

Build LinuxCNC

You can go ahead and download the LinuxCNC Distribution or else you can build yourself an up-to-date version.

In order to get an up-to-date version, download the LinuxCNC RPi image and write it to an SD Card.

Boot the card and then do the following to update the LinuxCNC package:

$ wget https://www.linuxcnc.org/dists/buster/2.8-rtpreempt/binary-armhf/linuxcnc-uspace_2.8.4_armhf.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i ./linuxcnc-uspace_2.8.4_armhf.deb

Future Buildroot

In order to build an OS specifically for LinuxCNC you can use the following instructions:

WARNING: These instructions are for future use, do not use yet.

$ wget https://buildroot.org/downloads/buildroot-2022.02.5.tar.gz
$ tar xf buildroot-2022.02.5.tar.gz
$ cd buildroot-2022.02.5
$ make raspberrypi4_64_defconfig