Mesa 7i96 + parallel bob

Thanks, PCW. I'm only connecting steppers for the Z & X axis on the lathe and do not currently have any home or limit switches, although I doubt those would be an electrical problem as the parallel bob is connected to the same 5 VDC supply as the 7i96. I did have a problem as I left the 7i96 configured to power the parallel port with 5 VDC. I knew this might not work so I had a multimeter connected to the leads as I powered it up. That immediately showed that I needed to move jumper W8 so the power was removed. Then I ran a parallel set of wired from the 7i96 power port to the bob and all is good.

Just need to get my bearings with regard to how the ports of the bob are addresses when it's connected in this fashion.

Here is the file for the mill:



Here is the ini file for the lathe as generated by pcnconf. I need to figure out what to modify in order to connect the X & Z steppers via the bob I've connected to the 25 pin port on the 7i96:

Hi BigJohnT,

I think I attached the replay to PCW's response, but here it is again:

Here is the file for the mill:



Here is the ini file for the lathe as generated by pcnconf. I need to figure out what to modify in order to connect the X & Z steppers via the bob I've connected to the 25 pin port on the 7i96:

The lines I needed to comment out were in the .hal file for the config. Lines 169 & the following 2:
# Spindle
#setp hm2_7i96.0.pwmgen.00.output-type 0
#setp hm2_7i96.0.pwmgen.00.scale [SPINDLE]MAX_RPM
#setp hm2_7i96.0.pwmgen.pwm_frequency [SPINDLE]PWM_FREQUENCY

My setup doesn'
t have a PWM on the spindle, so I didn't set anything up in the config. Seems like it writes these lines anyway.

I am as far as having flashed my 7i96 with firmware (7i96_5abob_d.bit). Using John's config utility to perform a "Get Pins" and viewing the raw output, I see p1-01 through p1-15, which I believe are the parallel bob's IO ports.

That screen shows p1-03 as StepGen #5, pin Step, and p1-05 as StepGen #5, pin Direction
and p1-07 as StepGen #6, pin Step, and p1-09 as StepGen #6, pin Direction

That is where I want to connect the stepper drivers for the lathe. If I use John's utility to make a lathe configuration with those steppers configured on the first 2 stepper outputs of the 7i96, how do I modify those lines so that they are now working on the parallel bob rather than the 7i96 ports?

Does anyone have example file(s) for doing this?

I do plan to add a spindle encoder to the lathe and I realize that the encoder will need to be configured to use the 7i96 inputs, but I am not that far yet and only need to get the steppers working on the lathe through the 7i96 & parallel bob.

This will be a separate configuration from my already functioning mill configuration.

The part that is tripping me up is how to modify the .ini/.hal files so that the configuration generated by John's tool will now operate the steppers through the parallel bob.

Thanks for any help! I'm getting extremely close now!

Hi PCW, after reading about lathe threading with an encoder, I've decided that I will add an encoder to the lathe & connect it to the 7i96 encoder input.

I've used John's config util to make a lathe config but it does not allow setting stepgen outputs to the expansion port & parallel card.

Do you have or know where I can get example config files for anything using a 7i96 with a parallel bob? I need to see any exampls to understand the changes I need to make in the config to use the parallel bob.

Dont have an example but it should just be a matter of changing the
stepgen numbers of all stepgen pins and parameters in the hal file
(0 to 5 and 1 to 6) and setting the num-stepgens token in the driver
command line high enough to include the highest stepgen used = probably 7)

EDIT

Note that you can do the stepgen channel number replacement quite easily with a decent editor,
that is globally replace stepgen.00 with stepgen.05, and stepgen.01 with stepgen.06
(assuming you assigned the lathe axis to stepgens 0 and 1in the config utility

Thanks, PCW. I've made those changes, but I'm getting an error: Linux parallel port #0 not found.

I assume that the expansion port on the Mesa 7i96 must have a specific or different address than the default parallel ports. My PC has no parallel ports.

I've done some searching but I can't figure out what I need to use to specify the parallel port address. Also, I'm only guessing that this is the problem.

Theres no parallel port at all so no parallel port driver or address are needed/wanted

Where firmware 7i96_5abob_d.bit is obtained