iforce2d
commented
5 months ago My guess is the SPI driver used by the weeny component is not supported. The RPi5 have a quite different arrangement of peripherals to previous models. The code for the weeny component uses bcm2835 driver which is not suitable either. So if this is the problem, it would explain why the component compiles ok but has problems running. It looks like the Pi5 is unsupported for a while. https://forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc/50203-linuxcnc-on-raspberry-pi-5?start=70#287736
If you have a 3B or 4B you would have much more success with those. fwiw all my setups are standard Buster, then replace the kernel with a realtime one, then build LinuxCNC from source. Those last two steps are quite slow and tedious to do in full, so I have some pre-compiled files I use. If you're only thinking to use the Pi for LinuxCNC then I think Buster would be good enough. I'll outline the steps here in case others might be interested.
I downloaded the Buster install from here, unfortunately it looks like they've scrubbed it now, wtf? https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/ Anyway the filename is '2023-02-21-raspios-buster-armhf.img.xz', maybe you can find it somewhere (plz link here if you do).
Full instructions for compiling a realtime kernel from scratch can be found here: https://lemariva.com/blog/2019/09/raspberry-pi-4b-preempt-rt-kernel-419y-performance-test Or if you want to use my pre-built files you can skip to the part where the kernel is actually installed (search for 'tgz' on that page). You can find my files here, note that they are different for 3B/Zero and 4B ! https://iforce2d.net/weeny
To install LinuxCNC after that you can use my pre-built .deb files, also at the above link.
By the way, you should normally be able to stop the LinuxCNC subsystem without a reboot (although who knows what the unsupported driver on Pi5 was doing). I have a script here which I use to shut down when running headless (no GUI). https://github.com/iforce2d/linuxcnc-gcode-server/tree/main/headless Failing that you could try killing the processes 'rtapi_app', 'milltask' and maybe also 'axis'.
Also btw, the weeny component should start up ok even without any STM32 hardware attached. It's only when you turn estop off that the SPI communication begins. When using a bluepill myself, I found that using only one ground connection between the Pi and the STM32 was sometimes not enough for a reliable connection, so I would recommend at least two grounds.
Jaron123
Hello, I'm trying to run your your weeny project on a Raspberry pi 5 using the pre-made linuxCNC distro file from the LinuxCNC website. I'm not sure what is causing the problem but running the hallcompile and install of weeny.c goes without problems. I have a bluepill STM32F103C8T6 programmed with weenyPRU-default.bin and wired them as in the weenyPRU v1.2 image on oshwlab website (Connected to SPI0).
When I then try to run linuxcnc with weeny-xyza.ini and hal example files i've gotten different errors at different times but it never works.
The first error I got was this:
Then linuxcnc won't shut down properly so I have to reboot, at some other try I got this:
and then at another try (Maybe this was after I rebooted after linuxcnc didn't shut down properly, not sure)
All I did was re-try after forcefully rebooting the pi after linuxcnc wouldn't shut down properly. i'm not sure the errors say anything usefull but hope you can help.
Oh and I wandered something, do I have to change anything to config.txt? I enabled SPI0 manually since it seemed only logical linux cnc would need it but it doesn't say anywhere in the documentation.