High power raspberry pi

[RUWO_builder]

So, i'm building a robot arm,to remove prints from all of my 3D printers. I'd also like to drive them completely in sinc.

i have a rackmounted xeon workstation i can borrow from a friend for a year. Id like to use it to calculate all of the movements trough a home-brew python script. Now, i need to be able to control all of the nema17 steppen motors via the pc. An arduino just cant drive enough, the rpi is not good at timing, and the pc Has way more power. Is this possible via a labjack or pcie gpio card? With external stepper drivers? 

What card/board is good? No mini pcie pls.

[manikyath]

do you mean high power as in high compute power, or do you mean high power as in being able to drive motors?

[RUWO_builder]

As in compute power, i have a external psu

[RUWO_builder]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

do you mean high power as in high compute power, or do you mean high power as in being able to drive motors?

I'm also belgian..... waffels for the win!

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, RUWO_builder said:

As in compute power, i have a external psu

i'd suggest something like an arduino mega should be plenty to take care of the motors, no matter how many you have, and if you need additional numbercrunching beyond that just connect it to a computer to it, and send instructions over the serial connection.

[That_PC_Kid]

You could wait for the R PI 4. I hear it will have a quad-core CPU clocked at 1.8 GHz and 2GB of RAM but I don't know if that is going to help any.

[RUWO_builder]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i'd suggest something like an arduino mega should be plenty to take care of the motors, no matter how many you have, and if you need additional numbercrunching beyond that just connect it to a computer to it, and send instructions over the serial connection.

I need 18 steppers.... cant find Any shield to drive that!

[RUWO_builder]

1 minute ago, That_PC_Kid said:

You could wait for the R PI 4. I hear it will have a quad-core CPU clocked at 1.8 GHz and 2GB of RAM but I don't know if that is going to help any.

Nah, talking about competent with a 8core xeon and a 1080 for cuda acseleration

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, That_PC_Kid said:

You could wait for the R PI 4. I hear it will have a quad-core CPU clocked at 1.8 GHz and 2GB of RAM but I don't know if that is going to help any.

even still then, seeing the price they will decide to slap on that thing, just get a freaking asrock x86 quadcore celeron board..

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, RUWO_builder said:

I need 18 steppers.... cant find Any shield to drive that!

thats one hell of a robot arm.. multiple arduinos? (base -- arm -- claw perhaps?)

[RUWO_builder]

17 minutes ago, manikyath said:

thats one hell of a robot arm.. multiple arduinos? (base -- arm -- claw perhaps?)

How do i let them comunicate with the least amount of delay

[cameroncoats]

Look at trinamic motor drives; TMC428/TMC429 motion controller handles all of the position control & homing etc for up to 3 stepper drivers, you just give it an absolute position over SPI.

 

You can use any stepper driver but you'll find trinamic eval boards that combine a TMC429 with a few of their drives.

[SpaceNugget]

On 19/02/2017 at 9:53 PM, RUWO_builder said:

Nah, talking about competent with a 8core xeon and a 1080 for cuda acseleration

You don't need a full blown desktop computer for this, a microcontroller will be fine.

[Huntsman]

This could be done with a microcontroller and RPi combo. Just have the RPi send instruction to the micro via serial. Microcontroller side haz stepper driver. 

[straight_stewie]

On 2/19/2017 at 11:52 PM, RUWO_builder said:

I need 18 steppers.... cant find Any shield to drive that!

I would like to ask why you need 18 stepper motors? Even in the most complex plastic based 3D printer and robotic arm to remove pieces I can think of you would only need 7 stepper motors combined. That's assuming that your printer uses 3 stepper motors, and your robotic arm will have base rotate, elbow up/down/, wrist rotate, and fist open/close functionality.

I would use a different robotic arm device for this task. I would have a plate that the object gets printed on, then you move the plate over, and slide another plate across the bottom to break the object away and off the bottom plate. The arm will then rotate back into place. This design would require no more than 1 stepper motor and 1 linear motor.

As for all this worry about cuda acceleration and needing a million core Xeon chip, what's that about? Are you planning on using an image processing neural net to drive your arm or something?

[cameroncoats]

Having thought about it a bit more, it'd be interesting to see if you could work out a vacuum pickup attachment or similar for the 3D printer's existing gantry.