Retrofitting a 1986 Maho MH400E

Note that the 7I74 is a passive device, so "7i74" will not show up anywhere,
but all the connected daughter cards should show up if the second sserial port is enabled.

The 7i74 won't have pins available will it. You probably need to connect the 7i784 to it then, and see if 7i84 i/o pins become available.

So I discovered a 2012 forum topic on the subject of configurations and this led me to Big John T's 7i77 tutorial configuration and his sample configurations. Despite being the most obvious option for a newb, PNCConf is probably not the way to go at all. The plot thickens...

Yes, I was looking for 7i84 pins, I'd read about the 7i74 being passive before. I unplugged the other cards and left the 7i77 to try the sample configs I found, but LinuxCNC wouldn't start with them. So instead I got into PNCConf again, selected a 7i77x2 firmware per the 5i25 manual and finally it allowed me to go through all the options. Now I'm going to set up what I can and then modify the config files to enable the 7i74 and the relay FPGA and pendant modules. Then I'll start wiring up components.

EDIT: sorry for the flurry of posts, but after unplugging the Philips I'm on a one-way street to get this going ASAP (there's a bunch of work waiting). I had a programmer buddy over the weekend to help but now that he's back at work I'm feeling lonesome in my workshop and want to exchange ideas all the time

Okay, I can't get LCNC to start with either John's sample config or the config I just made in PNCConf. I'm attaching a file with the log that came up when I tried to open my config. (The text formatting is broken because I copied the file to a Windows machine; it looks good in Linux). Does anyone know what the problem is?

It looks like the chosen 5i20 firmware only includes 6 encoders.