HM2_SPI(9)

NAME
hm2_spi - LinuxCNC HAL driver for the Mesa Electronics SPI Anything IO boards, with HostMot2 firmware.

SYNOPSIS

loadrt hm2_spi [config="str[,str...]"] [spidev_path=path[,path...]] [spidev_rate=rate[,rate...]]

    config [default: ""]
        HostMot2 config strings, described in the hostmot2(9) manpage.

    spidev_path [default: "/dev/spidev1.0"]
        The path to the spi device node, a character special device in /dev

    spidev_rate [default: 24000]
        The desired rate of the SPI clock in kHz. If the exact specified clock is not available, a lower clock is used. Due to shortcomings in the spidev API, it is not possible for hal to report the actual clock used.

DESCRIPTION
hm2_spi is a device driver that interfaces Mesa's SPI based Anything I/O boards (with the HostMot2 firmware) to the LinuxCNC HAL. The supported boards are: 7I90HD. The board must have a compatible firmware loaded on the board by the mesaflash(1) program. hm2_spi is only available when linuxcnc is configured with "uspace" realtime.

INTERFACE CONFIGURATION
It is possible for one SPI bus to connect several devices; in this configuration, a master device has several chip select lines. In order to meet realtime deadlines, hm2_spi should be used on a dedicated SPI interface not shared with any other slaves.

REALTIME PERFORMANCE OF LINUX SPIDEV DRIVERS
As of kernel 3.8, most or all kernel SPI drivers do not achieve the high realtime response rate required for a typical linuxcnc configuration. The driver was tested with a modified version of the spi-s3c64xx SPI driver on the Odroid U3 platform. The patched kernel resides on github (https://github.com/jepler/odroid-linux/tree/odroid-3.8.13-rt).

SPI CLOCK RATES
The maximum SPI clock of the 7i90 is documented as 50MHz. Other elements of the data path between HAL and the 7i90 may impose other limitations.

SEE ALSO
hostmot2(9)

LICENSE
GPL