gtclive / litex-cnc

Generic CNC firmware and driver for FPGA cards which are supported by LiteX

Welcome to LiteX-CNC!

This project aims to make a generic CNC firmware and driver for FPGA cards which are supported by LiteX. Configuration of the board and driver is done using json-files. The supported boards are the Colorlight boards 5A-75B and 5A-75E, as these are fully supported with the open source toolchain.

RV901T
Although the RV901T is also supported by Litex, the firmware cannot be automatically build with LitexCNC, as it requires the Xilinx-software to compile the Verilog to a bit-stream. LitexCNC can be used to create the Verilog and the driver will work when the bit-stream is loaded on the board. However, there is a gap in the toolchain not covered. There are known issues with the compantibility of Litex with Xilinx.

The idea of this project was conceived by ColorCNC by romanetz on the official LinuxCNC and the difficulty to obtain a MESA card.

Acknowledgements

This project would not be possible without:

• ColorCNC by romanetz link;
• HostMot2 (MESA card driver) as the structure of the driver has been adopted.

Quick start

LitexCNC can be installed using pip:

pip install litexcnc[cli]

NOTE: Suffix [cli] required!
The suffix [cli] is required to install the command-line interface. Without this suffix the scripts referenced below will not work.

After installation of LitexCNC the following scripts are available to the user:

litexcnc install_driver
litexcnc install_litex
litexcnc install_toolchain
litexcnc build_driver

For a full overview on how to use the commands, please refer to the documentation.