Pseudonymous maker “audioartillery” has penned a information to operating a pc numeric management (CNC) mill or different gadget from a Raspberry Pi single-board pc — straight, utilizing its general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins reasonably than an exterior controller board.
“This text is about utilizing LinuxCNC on Raspberry Pi microcomputers for management of a CNC machine,” audioartillery writes by means of introduction. “It would particularly give attention to direct management of CNC machine stepper motors with the Raspberry Pi I/O [Input/Output] pins (versus with an Ethernet based mostly management board resembling Mesa).”
In the event you’re trying to construct a CNC, you won’t want a devoted controller — a Raspberry Pi can do the trick. (📷: audioartillery)
Raspberry Pi single-board computer systems aren’t any unusual sight in CNC, robotics, and 3D printing initiatives, due to their comparatively excessive efficiency for his or her measurement and value. What’s much less frequent, although, is to see the GPIO header getting used to straight management mentioned gadgets — with the Raspberry Pi often given extra of an orchestrating function and the {hardware} interfacing being left as much as devoted controller boards, usually linked over USB or Ethernet.
“You’ll have heard {that a} Raspberry Pi cannot straight management stepper motors and also you want an Ethernet based mostly controller (Mesa and so forth) or an MCU [Microcontroller] based mostly controller (Arduino, and so forth),” audioartillery explains. “So far as I can inform, this isn’t true. Nonetheless it’s price digging into the small print round efficiency. The utmost replace fee will restrict how briskly you possibly can flip your stepper motors and thus the velocity of the machine. It is mentioned the utmost replace fee is 5kHz, which is usable.”
The Raspberry Pi runs a instrument referred to as LinuxCNC, which connects to the motor drivers over the GPIO pins. (📷: audioartillery)
For software program, audioartillery is utilizing the open-source LinuxCNC. For {hardware}, a Raspberry Pi 5 — “4GB model is ok,” the maker notes — with a Byte2Bot Parallel HAT add-on, a stepper motor breakout board, and driver modules for the CNC’s X, Y, and Z axis stepper motors.
The total write-up is accessible on Instructables; audioartillery has additionally designed a 3D-printable case for the Raspberry Pi 5 to make energetic cooling simpler, however on the time of writing had but to launch the print information.