Its more like a 5 year old laptop really…

Totally usable as a 'normal' computer.

Also not many old laptops can do 2 screens at 4k/60, have 2 cameras and GPIO.

I think this one is going to end up as the CNC controller for my CNC build.

Dave

I'm Head of Engineering at a Raspberry Pi Design Partner.

One of the harder parts of the job is knowing the stuff which is coming and not telling anyone…

Dave

Its the best Pi yet.

Would recommend getting the cooler or the dedicated case with fan in it – the CPU runs quite a bit hotter than the 4 – not dangerously so, but hot enough that I'll be adding a cooler once I get round to it.

It can also peak a lot of current from the PSU, so whilst the 3A supply for a Pi4 is fine (that's what I'm currently using) if you don't have a lot of things hanging off the USB etc the new supply is designed to support maximum performance. I will be buying (with my own money) one of those when they become available.

Seeing it run with a pair of cameras and 2 4k screens was impressive – I can see it being the basis for a Projector + cameras shape measurement system at 'fairly' low cost. (I used to do precision high speed large volume optical metrology at a previous job).

The PCIe connector is going to open up some interesting possibilities…

Interestingly the feature the Pi team seemed most pleased with was the power button…

Dave

Gee Dave
You Mentioned, "(I used to do precision high speed large volume optical metrology at a previous job)".

Are you able to say how?

Regards
J

Should be a fairly simple bit of coding. The Centronics interface is/was pretty simple minded. Enough so that I emulated it woth oneof our HP computers in the early '90s in order to drive a printer that had been bought in mistake by the department.

John,

This should link the the sales pdf: Wayback Machine (archive.org)

Basically project a load of straight lines, take a photo form the side, do some maths to decode the bendyness the camera sees.

A quick google shows there are several parallel port HATs available for a Pi – thats probably the route I would take if I needed to.

Dave

Should be a 7 or 8 page brochure. The company was Phase Vision, so you could always search phasevision.com on the wayback machine.

Sadly ran out of money, as with a lot of startup / spinouts.

Dave

I thought the big problem for LinuxCNC using the printer port was the multitasking of the processor, particularly video generation, screwing up the timing for direct drive of steppers. It should be possible to avoid this by leaving one of the cores for the user to use unmolested, but is that the case?

well – for linuxcnc it depends on the realtime latency of the system. I have been running the PI4 with linuxcnc for a long time – but using a mesa ethernet card to do the heavy lifting. (step generation and such)

The maximum jitter I get is around 50us or so. This is perfectly fine for external interfaces like mesa.

Linuxcnc does have a gpio driver for the pi – but again you are limited to how fast the realtime kernel can twittle bits. I I goofed around with it a while back – and was getting about 10khz step rates. Not stellar…