Bridgeport Series 2 Interact 4 Retrofit

Hi Everyone, 

Wanted to share my project of 7 years which is my bridgeport series 2 interact 4. Bought in 2015 as a half done retrofit and "temporarily" put it all back together with a mach3 setup to get it all running and make some parts for friends with the intention of doing a linuxcnc setup. After 7 years of it running reasonably and earning its spot in my backyard machine shop the time has finally come to switch. In 2020 I moved my machines from Canada to New Zealand where I live permanently now and the mach setup has never been quite the same (probably due to the dirtier power here), so time to add some robustness. 





I have had a 5i25/7i76 setup sitting around for a hitachi seiki lathe project (to be coming soon) so decided to wire that in. It was working very well until  it wasn't. Long story short it seems I have shorted something on the 7i76 and I can no longer connect to the card, getting the "output-00 not found" error on startup (I'll probe around later and see if I can repair the board). Luckily before Christmas I bought the same setup that RotarySMP has been working with for his schaublin 125 in hopes that I could copy his HAL and get the lathe with analogue servos running easily! 

I have started to port over the cards to replace the 7i76 setup and luckily my servos (Allen Bradley Ultra 3000i) are step/dir as well as 10V compatible. I have been connecting all of the boards up for testing, the setup is: 7i92/7i85 with 7i83,7i84,7i73 serial boards. I have flashed the 7i92_7i85xD.bit file with mesaflash (thanks again to RotarySMP for going through that for me already!) and have the watchdog light working on the 7i73. Next is to get a HAL file together to test some digital in/outputs and then the analogue output with encoder feedback. 

Would anyone here have a sample HAL file that will help me with the setup of analogue output over the serial device? I am currently working off of a pncconf HAL with 7i92 and 7i77 selected but it seems slightly different being the analogue outputs are on a serial card for me. All fairly new to me but I'm picking it up the best I can as I truck along!

Much appreciated in advance,
Cheers

Just a quick one re the error . What is the complete error ? as it may just be a hal prob like a missing pin

Sure thing. Have attached the error report. I haden't considered one bad pin would make it happen but Id be alright with that! 

Well I have done some playing around with the 7i76 board connected to the 7i92 just for convenience as it is sitting on my desktop and not in the garage. I removed all of the inputs and outputs and linuxcnc loads fine. As I add the pins back in I get the pin does not exist error again. I was however able to add stepgen pins and still have linuxcnc load up. I cant get any of the io busses or the spindle to load though. I have attached the HAL file that was able to load up the interface.

The best solution here is to commen tout the line with the error (35 in the earlier example) and and then when you can get the hal to load, check the pin names in halshow or even better in another terminal window try typing
halcmd show pin
 This will show the correct pin names

Yes confirmed I have 24V to field and a 5V 2A supply for the 7i92 with jumpers set to pass to the 7i76, both power lights on the 7i76 as well. Going through the 7i92/7i76 config from pncconf I commented out all of the lines that prevented linuxcnc from starting up. Essentially it was all of the 7i76 io pins, can be seen in the attached HAL file. When I had it running I ran HAL show pins and attached the output as well. The only io pin that allowed a startup was hm2_7i92.0.gpio.000.in which I think is a 7i92 pin directly and not addressing the 7i76? As well, the stepgen pins also didn't cause issues but when jogging around with an led attached to the direction pin it is flashing both ways, not on one way and off the other as I would expect. 

One error I was not expecting is "unexpected realtime delay on task 0" and "hm2/hm2_7i92.0: error finishing read! iter=6" I have servo_period set to 20,000 with my max jitter over 4 hours measured as 16246. I had to increase the servo period to 500,000 to make these errors on startup go away.

I feel its time to put the 7i76 aside and get the 7i85 working with analogue outputs so I can get some machining work done. Is there an example someone has to address io and analogue pins on a serial connected device to the 7i85? I have a 7i83 and 7i84 connected for io and analogue out.
Cheers,

1. The servo period should be 1 ms (1000000)
2. If you are using a 7I76, you must have:
A. Proper firmware with 7I76 support in the 7I92
B. Both 5V and field power supplied to the 7I76
C. The 7I76 connected to the correct 7I92 port

Perfect the servo period at 1ms shows no errors at startup! I am getting joint following errors when I jog around but I haven't looked through my joint config carefully yet.

A. I am using the 7i92_7i76x1D.bit file flashed and confirmed with mesaflash
B. 5V is supplied to the 7i92 (2A supply) with W3 and 4 set up. Do I need a separate external supply?
C. I am plugged into 7i92 port P2

You need field power supplied to the 7I76 (8 to 32V on the orange connector)