Arduino I/O with Linuxcnc

I am using a MESA 5i25 - 7i76 combo, so I do in fact have enough inputs to wire the pendent directly into the 7i76, I even have an encoder input available.
However I wouldn't be able to display the machine position on the pendant that way.

Miselph wrote: I am using a MESA 5i25 - 7i76 combo, so I do in fact have enough inputs to wire the pendent directly into the 7i76, I even have an encoder input available.
However I wouldn't be able to display the machine position on the pendant that way.

The 7i73 (plugs into the RS422 port on the 7i76) might be a simpler solution. We even have an LCD HAL component now:

Andy Pugh wrote:

... We even have an LCD HAL component now:

I wondered if you had finished that.

If you have a mesa board, you have all the I/O you need, and it wouldn't make sense to try to pass a MPG output through the Arduino via a serial link, they work very well natively just connected directly.

Now that Andy has made the Mesa LCD display easier to use, that seems an obvious way to go.

oooooo That's a bit good.
How simple is it to integrate into Linuxcnc? I understand that pcnconf has the details for it but I don't want to re-run pncconf as I have a gantry machine and pncconf will overwrite my nice ini and hal file and break everything

It is definitely something to think about. One of the main draws to the arduino / usb method tho is that I was planning on using a Bluetooth wireless link as the operator can walk right round the machine and I don't want cables getting tangled up.

Ideas / opinions?

Miselph wrote: How simple is it to integrate into Linuxcnc?

Pretty easy, you plug it in with a CAT5 cable and all the pins appear in HAL. (Lots of IO, 4 encoder counters, some analogue inputs)
You can link them all up as you feel fit in a custom.hal file.
7i73 Manual:
www.mesanet.com/pdf/parallel/7i73man.pdf
LCD HAL module docs:
www.linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/lcd.9.html

andypugh wrote: LCD HAL module docs:
www.linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man9/lcd.9.html

And what a lot of formatting errors there are in that document. I will try to fix it tonight.