ok, good to know. As for the motor encoders not working within the Machinekit environment I might take a look at that. I’m not a great coder by any stretch of the imagination by maybe I can hack something together to read those motor encoders.
I have a MaslowCNC hardware kit(version 1) and I also have some smaller motors with similar(if not the same) encoders on them. I also have a couple BeagleBone Blacks and a CRAMPS board which hasn’t been assembled yet. The assembled CRAMPS is running Machinekit on my delta 3D printer.
Machinekit supports the PRUs in that it can communicate with the memory shared with the PRUs. I believe the configuration for the Kossel Delta 3D printer and the CRAMPS board uses the PRUs to run the delta motion control kinematics. Charles Steinkuehler is active on the Machinekit google group and designer of the CRAMPS board. Good guy and good engineer and he groks both hardware and software very well. He is the one who put together the Machinekit code for the delta 3D printer(kinematics and all).
I have a Chinese 3040 CNC machine which has a parallel port for control and after getting GRBL running on an Arduino Nano and controlling the 3040CNC with bCNC I was interesting in connecting a BeagleBone Black to it so I could just connect display, keyboard/mouse in the garage instead of tieing up a laptop… Similar in function to what we’re talking about with MaslowCNC. Charles commented so I know he’s still active in the Machinekit forums.
Back to the PRUs, they are still developed for as an embedded device inside the Linux environment. Thankfully C code is now used instead of assembly. It’s been almost 5 years since I dabbled in the Machinekit system so I hope the PRU coding has been made much easier. But I don’t have hands-on experience with that.