Change to open source firmware

[tgunr (Dave Carlton)]

I too am interested in this topic. I recently canceled my X50 upgrade to Masso for the primary reason I don’t want to switch to non proprietary firmware. I’ve looked at a number of options and decided for now I would just dive into the source code and figure it out. I used to manage the Open Firmware department at Apple so do know a bit about embedded systems.

[tgunr (Dave Carlton)]

How did you determine the 1F repo was forked from BB 0.4.14? The only tags I see are 0.4.11 and 0.4.12 back in 2020.

[tgunr (Dave Carlton)]

FWIW, spent the last couple of days digging into the source code for the firmware and finally got a build going on my debian server. Uploaded the pkg and it did not come up fully. I was able to ssh into the controller and discovered bbctrl was not starting up.

Looked for and discovered /usr/locl/bin/upgrade-bbctrl which downloaded the current 1.4.0 and now bavk up.

So now to dig into why bbctrl is not starting.

Making progress!

Getting the code to compile was a a

[Aiph5u (Aiph5u (not affiliated with Onefinity))]

Hey Dave,

@Aiph5u

…the ‘onefinity-firmware’ package is the only package on the Raspberry Pi OS system inside the Onefinity Controller that is not packed as ‘.deb’ package and therefore cannot simply be downgraded with ‘apt-get install onefinity-firmware=1.0.9’, which would have been very helpful when Onefinity abandoned and withdraw the 1.1x branch and told people they need to reflash the entire OS on the SD card.

Usually it is never necessary to overwrite (re-flash) a Raspberry Pi OS installation (except if the SD card fails). Today, all Unixoid Operating Systems have smart package management systems . Usually unixoid operating systems have an uptime of monthes, even years, and are updated while they run – including occasionally necessary downgrade of a package. On Debian-derived systems like the Raspberry Pi OS, this is the Advanced Package Tool (APT) system which deals with deb packages.

But it’s not trivial to pack a package as deb file, not only you have to learn debian policy, but you first also would need to integrate the bbserial kernel module into the Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) system so that it is automatically re-built on any kernel upgrade. Currently it is hardwired to an ancient kernel source and as soon you upgrade the kernel, the bbserial module ceases to work and the Onefinity System cannot access the AVR mainboard with the stepper drivers anymore. This is why you are stuck with a Raspbian operating system of 2017 with all the security issues that came up since then.

The ‘bbserial.ko’ kernel module is what lets the Raspberry Pi communicate with the AVR board with its stepper drivers etc… If it is not compiled for the installed kernel version, you have no CNC controller but just a Raspberry Pi.

@Aiph5u

The buildbotics-based Onefinity Controller works as you can see in the circuit diagram here. On the software side, the user interface is a web interface that runs in a chromium browser on top of a Raspberry Pi OS or on any web browser on a computer you connect remotely via Ethernet or Wifi. The CNC commands input by the user are sent from the Raspberry Pi 3B to the AVR mainboard through a synchronous serial communications interface that the buildbotics author implemented as a bbserial.ko kernel module through the Raspi GPIO pins now called SERIAL_TX, SERIAL_RX and SERIAL_CTS. On the AVR mainboard, the AVR microcontroller controls the four Texas Instruments DRV8711 stepper drivers over the

• step{X,Y,Z,A},
• dir{X,Y,Z,A},
• motor enable, and
• motor fault inputs.

On the original Buildbotics controller, which evolved a bit further ([1], [2]), these control ports are accessible from the outside over a a 15-pin Auxiliary motor control port. This allows you to drive any external stepper driver, including closed-loop drivers. Unfortunately on the Onefinity hardware fork, you don’t have this 15-pin auxiliary port.

@Aiph5u

@Aiph5u

@Aiph5u

You cannot update any of the packages of the ancient Raspbian Stretch installation from 2017 on the Onefinity SD card without making the CNC controller functions ceasing to work. This is because more or less every package of which you want to install a recent version relies on countless dependencies to other recent packages that you can only fulfill by a complete OS upgrade. But a OS upgrade is not possible. This is because the crucial bbserial.ko kernel module, that makes communication with the AVR mainboard with the stepper drivers possible, is not packed as a .deb package and not integrated in Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) so will not be re-compiled automatically on a kernel package upgrade, so on kernel module loading, this module will fail, turning your Onefinity Controller into a brick with an updated Raspberry PI OS running, but being no more a CNC controller. So updating chrome or any of the packages that could have old security issues, is not possible.

It should however possible to take an SD card and flash a new, up-to-date Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) on it and to build (=compile and install) the Onefinity System from the sources , as mentioned above, where I mentioned that a user built the buildbotics sources on a recent Raspberry Pi 400 with a recent 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS system.

The image that Onefinity has on the controller it delivers is old:

root@onefinity:~# cat /etc/debian_version
9.3

9.3 is “Strech” (2017)

Raspbian Releases

[tgunr (Dave Carlton)]

Yes I saw that, I built on the docker container in the repo which is bullseye as I recall. According to the image I uploaded to the controller it is 9.3.

[XstormX (emostorm7@gmail.com)]

Thanks for working in it