Feasibility of running DSF on X86
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@Falcounet x86 SBCs are just as expensive as ARM ones from what I am seeing.
What is not expensive is the computer you already have. For instance I recently upgraded my desktop. I turned my old PC into a Linux file server. It has an 8th gen Intel, 32gigs of RAM, an NVMe SSD, and several large drives. 99% of the time it is doing nothing. Running DSF on it should be perfectly fine.
If DSF on x86 becomes a thing, I could see people containerizing DSF in say Docker and running a print farm off a single server.
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@CthulhuLabs I'm not sure everyone is up to have a desktop computer near their printer to run it ... so not sure there will be much interest if x86 SBC aren't cheaper or more available than the ARM ones.
But I don't want to refrain you trying it.
As you say, maybe things can change if DSF on x86 become a thing. -
@CthulhuLabs one thing to take into consideration is the additional latency and potentially variable priority of performance of the USB connection and the USB to SPI convertor. One reason we picked the SPI bus on the PI (instead of using USB is that DSF "owns" it completely so the OS can't prioritise other traffic etc which it can with USB.
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@T3P3Tony That is a good point. A user moving their mouse could potentially generate thousands of USB interrupts. I was wondering why you guys didnt make the SBC mode use USB directly. This is why I asked.
How tight do the timings need to be? Shouldnt be too hard to test with an arduino. Simply write a sketch that echo's input on the arduino's SPI back to PC SPI. Then send a "ping" to the arduino at a regular interval and log how long the response took to come back. While that is running do a bunch of USB intensive stuff.
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@CthulhuLabs What would be the benefit of running DSF on that X86 instead of (wireless) DWC?
I have an old laptop running Linux from an USB-stick. I use the browser to control my CNC. It only has a 15" screen and no fullHD capability, so running DWC is a bit awkward...
Why would you recommend using DSF? I never tried SBC at all, because I couldn't find a good reason (yet) -
@o_lampe Mostly customization. For instance I have a python script that overrides the M3,M4, and M5 commands to control my external spindle with closed loop control. You have to be running in SBC mode for that to work.
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@CthulhuLabs You can certainly run DSF on x86 but GPIO and SPI capability is limited on x86 AFAICS. Note that DSF relies on the relatively new gpiod Linux driver to achieve reasonable transfer speeds so you need to make sure that's supported by your Linux kernel.
I am not sure how well USB <-> SPI adapters work because I'd expect them to introduce notable latency. If you want to stick with x86, perhaps consider trying something like a PCI(e) <-> SPI/GPIO card but be aware that I have not tried that yet. Hence I can't say how well or if that works at all.
PS: At least the MPX-24794S PCIe card plugs in via USB as well so probably the same limitation applies then. Not sure if there are other cards out there for GPIO/SPI.
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@chrishamm what kind of latency / jitter in the SPI communication is acceptable for DSF to work properly?
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@CthulhuLabs Generally it should be as low as possible. DSF tolerates delays up to 500ms per transfer but if you see lots of delays, you'll probably get sluggish movement when performing circles or lots of short moves. Also note that RRF flags when it is ready to perform an SPI transfer and if it takes notable time before DSF sees that, it will slow down the transfer rate as well. For that reason I also rely on
gpiodinstead ofsysfsbecause it reports pin changes much quicker. -
@chrishamm Looks like people are claiming the latency is 1ms:
https://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=93211
There is also a latency timer built into the chip that FTDI's techs say can be set as low as 1ms. Not internally sure what that does.
I'll order one and play around with it to see what kind of results I can get.
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I just got an Adafruit FT232H Breakout board. I am realizing that testing this is not as easy as I first though. Most of the simple microcontroller firmwares like Arduino / Circuit Python lack direct support for SPI Slave mode on the newer microcontrollers. They all seem to think that people only want to use their microcontroller as the SPI Master. That said it looks like the original AVR based Arduino's have good documentation on how to initialize SPI Slave through the SPI Registers. I have an Arduino MEGA from my original RAMPS 1.4 controller from 2014. Hopefully it is still working and I can get the SPI Bus speed up to 8Mhz in Slave mode.
My plan is to have the FT232H enable the CS and then transmit to the MEGA the current timestamp with as high of accuracy as I can get. It will then disable the CS. It will then wait for the MEGA to set its interrupt pin high. The MEGA will sleep for 1ms and then set its interrupt pin high. The FT232H will then enable the CS and read from the MEGA the last timestamp. It will then disable the CS and finally print on the CLI the current timestamp, the timestamp it received from the MEGA, and the difference minus 1ms (accounting for the MEGA's programmed delay). This should be the latency. I will have this whole process running in a loop. Depending on how much latency I am seeing, Ill probably have it loop like this 10 times a second. Then I will run this while doing other things on the USB bus, (moving a mouse, typing, accessing a USB2 thumb drive, accessing a USB3 thumb drive, etc.) Ill also test this with the FT232H going through a hub as well as being directly connected to the motherboards USB host controller. Ill take the output and generate some nice pretty graphs.
@chrishamm & @T3P3Tony does this sound like a valid test? Any recommendations on things to change?
