D510MO

I have been following this thread and decided to try out one of these boards.
I got the intel 4GB internal usb flash drive.
I was having problems getting it to boot after installation.
I found that the BIOS needed to be updated (board had vers. 0400, current vers. 542)

Lesson learned: Don;t assume that a new part has all of the latest patches for proper operation!

I hope this is an aid to others thinking of trying this motherboard.

RayM

Go to the Intel site www.intel.com
select support from the menu
select "Desktop boards, Intel NM10 chipset family boards, Intel D510MO

that should get you to the downloads page for this motherboard.
select the BIOS downloads. that will show three options. I downloaded the zip file.
On that page you can select the release notes to look through what has been fixed since version 0400

I made a DOS bootable USB stick then unziped the files to that (move the files to the root directory of the USB)
Boot from the stick, then run the iflash2 utility: iflash2 /p MO0542p.bio

It takes about a minute to run. DO NOT POWER DOWN WHILE UPDATE IS IN PROGRESS the system will reboot a couple of times during the process.

This update fixed three issues I was having with installing and running from USB media, plus the system seems more stable.

Ray

Got the chance to get a D510MO for a bargain and since my old IBM ThinkCentre doesn't have the best latency times, I thought it's time for a change. Unfortunately I have some strange realtime problems with the board and can't find the reason.

Worst case max jitter is up to 8000ns when I connect USB devices like a stick. My TripleBeast controller runs with the following values:
Step time: 2000ns
Step space: 2000ns
Dir. hold: 2000ns
Dir. setup: 2000ns

I thought I'd be on the very safe side with a base period of 20000 but while testing today I've got a few times the message "Unexpected realtime delay; check dmesg for details". Also it happened a few times that there was only a black screen with the cursor left, when I closed Axis. In some cases I was able to properly shut down the computer by power switch, in other cases the system freezed completely. I increased the base period now up to 35000 but the problem remains.

My system:
- PCI LPT card with Moschip MCS9865
- 160GB WD 2.5" HDD
- 2GB Ram
- PS/2 industrial keyboard with trackball
- Logitech game controller
- fresh Ubuntu 10.04 installation from a live cd, with all recommended updates

Any ideas what to do? I let the latency test run 2 times over night but there are no spikes at all.

Unexpected realtime delay; check dmesg for details

What was in dmesg?

Run linuxcnc until you get the message, close it and immediately copy /var/logs/dmesg somewhere else and zip it and attach.

regards

Checked it today: The X server seems to be stable after I disabled hyperthreading. This problem is obviously solved.

What I didn't solve was the realtime delay. I just found out that it only appears once when I start the first ngc-file after starting axis. After that the program runs without errors and also following ngc-files will be started without an error.

When starting the first file I'll always be prompted for tool change. I never paid any attention to it but it seems that the realtime delay only appears in cases when I was prompted for tool change. I make my g-code with Aspire and got used to split the jobs in files for each tool because Aspire gives me an error "The visible toolpaths use different tools and the selected Post Processor does not support toolchanging" when I try to save toolpaths with different tools into a single file.

I know that this isn't the right place for asking questions about Aspire but since the realtime delay only appears with the "new" D510MO after I was prompted for tool change, I would like to attach my postprocessor as well.

andypugh wrote:

Unfortunately that doesn't mean that there are no more over-runs, as the error message is only printed once per session.

Does this apply to any realtime delay message? I remember other realtime delay messages in Axis that clearly said that they only appear once per session but this one did not.