Acorn controller and Raspberry Pi

[mastuart]

I was just wondering if anyone has use a Raspberry Pi 4 and has got it to work with a Acorn.

Thanks Mark

[eng199]

I doubt it. It is completely impractical if your goal is to control a CNC machine.

https://www.centroidcnc.com/cnc_pc_perf ... ments.html

[mastuart]

Thanks for your reply. Why is it completely impractical? They are capable of running windows 10. They have a quad core processor. You can get plenty of ram on them and storage space. They are able to run 2 4k screens at the same time. Some use them for gaming computers. They are way more computer than old Pentium computers. Lots of old cnc machines around that use 286 386 486 computers. I could not find the chip in the list to see what the single core thread speed would be in the link you posted.

[Sword]

One way to find out, install windows 10 and then CNC12, then once you have it all set up and working, try running a 3D/V-carve file or something similar to see if it chokes. Then report back.

[drdennis]

Lots of old cnc machines around that use 286 386 486 computers.

@mastuart you are mixing running a CNC machine with running Windows 10 -- apples and oranges. You are right, there were and still are CNC machines that run on old x86 processors. But they run DOS or other real-time operating systems, and unlike Windows do not waste billions of CPU cycles on tasks not needed for CNC control. Windows is just not suited for real-time control and the way around it is to 1) use a very fast machine and 2) offload as much of the real time processing as you can to a different processor (in this case the ARM A8 on the Beaglebone in Acorn).

Given the complexity and unpredictable nature of the Windows OS the only thing you can do is, as @Sword pointed out, build your system on Pi4 and test it. It is an empirical process.
Cheers

[rruizvial]

Beaglobone has a programmable real time operation unit
https://beagleboard.org/pru

for other hand, raspberry is a general process-oriented card
https://all3dp.com/2/rtos-raspberry-pi-real-time-os/

[eng199]

PI4's CPU Mark is 1/3 of what is recommended.
Most low end desktops easily meet the single core benchmark recommendation.