Please recommend PCI-E Parallel Port card

I read the FAQ for PCI parallel port cards and bought a cheap PCI-E card off eBay that has a MOSCHIP 9901 controller.

www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-25-pin-PCI-E-Expres...p2057872.m2749.l2649

I put this into an HP Pavilion AMD A10 system that only has PCI-E slots and no on-board parallel port. The box is running Unbuntu 12.04 with all the LinuxCNC packages and 3.4.9 PAE real time kernel. The OS does not recognize the card as a parallel port card. It sees it as a serial card.

The card came with a driver CD with driver source code but poorly written docs. I have been drowning in Linux how-tos for rebuilding the kernel. I'm a software engineer with a EE background but have run out of patience building my own drivers.

If there is a simple procedure I can follow to fix this I would give it a try.

I would rather just buy a PCI-E parallel port card that will just work with the OS as-is. I'd be willing to pay $20 - $30 to do this.

Any help that anyone can provide is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ken

EDIT: I found a web post where someone tested a StarLink PCI-E parallel card with LinuxCNC. Anyone have any experience with this card? Especially with Ubuntu-based LinuxCNC?

www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item...ALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Here's a link to the test article:

kent-vandervelden.blogspot.com/2014/08/l...llel-port-cards.html

This is the one I bought. Looks very similar to yours apart from the serial DB9 daughterboard, allegedly the same chipset, but maybe there's different iterations of the same thing?:

www.ebay.com.au/itm/251488325450?ViewItem=&item=251488325450

Provided I pick the right LPT address in the StepConf Wizard it has worked in Ubuntu 10.04, Debian Wheezy and Linux Mint 18.1.

I don't recall installing anything; just plug it in and off it goes. It just appears as an LPT port with a different hex address to the usual 0x378.

Hmm, very strange! I use the MosChip 9900 and 9901 cards with my hardware, and they seem to work fine. There is a configuration EPROM on the board which loads the configuration into the MosChip 990x at power-on, and it sounds like yours has the wrong config in that EPROM. The MosChip 990x has both parallel and serial interfaces which can be turned on or off by the config EPROM.

The ones I sell are marked Syba SD-PEX10005.

You do not need any drivers for this, LinuxCNC contains special drivers that run in the real time environment, so it doesn't use any OS-provided drivers.

Jon

Sorry to reopen an old thread, but i have one of the Syba pex 9901 cards and for the life of me can't get it to work properly... I am in the process of upgrading my box and when i got my motherboard it was pcie only, so my old parport cards are useless. So i got a Syba card and it works(ish).

when i start linuxcnc i get an error saying that parallel port cant be found, yet i can still home and move as with my older system.

this is a clean build using the debian stretch rt image and 2.8 buildbot lxcnc. (pre release from about 2 weeks ago, not at shop, so i cant say exactly which version it is)

also, how do you configure the eeprom on board?

thanks!

in at least as i was willing to try it, yes. it homes and jogs, but that is as far as i was willing to push it.

lspci shows that the card is detected an gives the address as e000/e010 but dmsg shows no parport listed. when i use the address e010, i get the error that parport not found, yet machine works. if i use address 0, i get nothing but error.

i built the machine and installed from live cd and updated to the master branch before i realized that the board was pcie only, so i checked for compatible cards and ordered the syba. day before yesterday, on a whim, i did fresh installation with the card already installed just to make sure that possibly something wasnt missed during install process. no joy. so now i have a startech that came in yesterday that i am going to try.

for the record, i cant wait until 2.8 is official because joints/axis is absolutely BRILLIANT (although there is a *SERIOUS* bug/logic error in gantry movement prior to homing that will rip a machine apart that i need to report but this isnt the thread). I just really wish that you would move away from debian as your primary distro and make linuxcnc more distro agnostic. of all the distros out there, debian? i would vote for arch/lbuntu with openbox for a dedicated machine. light, fast, no frills

Can you post your hal file? is it possible you are loading some other driver in addition to hal_parport?

If hal_parport works with the card, it should not complain (and if it does, I think thats a bug)

(the 0,1,2 address shortcut will only work if Linux detects the card but this should not matter to hal_parport if the actual parallel port base address is provided)

Plus if you are technically knowledgeable enough to care about distributions its not that difficult to install LinuxCNC on your distribution of choice.