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Motion Control Cape

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Jason Kridner edited this page Apr 23, 2020 · 4 revisions

This cape enables development of 3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters and other robotics requiring motion control.

Focused on the needs and inputs of the Machinekit community, the Machinekit software:

is a platform for machine control applications.

Machinekit is portable across a wide range of hardware platforms and real-time environments, and delivers excellent performance at low cost. It is based on the HAL component architecture, an intuitive and easy to use circuit model that includes over 150 building blocks for digital logic, motion, control loops, signal processing, and hardware drivers. Machinekit supports local and networked UI options, including ubiquitous platforms like phones or tablets.

Proposal for this was put forward on the Machinekit mailing list and BeagleBoard mailing list.

Objectives

  • Target BeagleBone AI (primarily), BeagleBone Black/Green/Enhanced (secondarily), and any upcoming BeagleBone boards compatible with the Cape Interface Spec.
  • Be available reliably for long-term as an open reference for developing machines and more customized capes

Non-objectives

Feature priority list

This is a bit different than some people have seen on a feature priority list as it is a hard linear rank-order. There are pricing and size goals interleaved in here and they may look odd to have a priority of a price of $100 be higher priority than a price of $50. What might not be obvious is the design objective to go as far down the feature priority list as possible in order. This means that while we'd like to satisfy all the features at $50, either the features or the price need to be the priority, so a priority like a higher price gives us a baseline where if we can't be cheaper than that, simply don't make the board.

This list is a dynamic work-in-progress meant to solicit feedback from the community. Please provide feedback via the mailing list and/or issues list.

  • <$300 PCBA + baseline of fully-populated add-on modules required for full software validation
  • <$150 PCBA
  • 4 stepper driver sockets
  • <$100 PCBA
  • 6 stepper driver sockets
  • 4 integrated stepper drivers w/ option for external driver replacement (soldering required)
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