No Input on parallel port PCI card

Let me introduce me first. My name is Steffen, I am a nearly 30 year old mechanical engineer, working in the research industries in Germany. I recently bought the most crappiest CNC router one could imagine (I think there are more than 3 broken tread tabs in the machine remaining), but it was cheap and I will get it mechanically get to work.

I also purchased an old PC (core 2 Quad Q6600), on that I was able to install wheezy and linux cnc, jitter is with some tweaking (thank you Linux CNC forum!) about 18 000ns.

The mainboard has no parallel port, so I bought a PCI card (2 different ones by now). Both seem to work, except they do not show any response to inputs. I can control the machine, in stepconf and in the machine control, but I can not get any response on the inputs.
I tried various things, including a different PCI card, but nothing seems to help.


My test procedure is to short wire pin 1 and 10 on the paralleport. I expect the pin 10 input to change, corresponding to the output number one (I control it with the paralleport tester).

The card seems to be recognized as parport 0.

Any ideas on why my pc does not recognize inputs but all outputs work fine? Or even better, has someone a solution to that

Are you using a brake-out board. Also post your config files ie HAL and INI file will help

I you are using the Chinese bob with a relay on it . It requires 12-24v as well as 5V

thanks for the quick replay. Attached you find the ini and hal file.

I am currently using/measuring only directly the port. I have also the ability to measure voltages if this could be helpful?
For the stepper drivers, I am using a cheap chinese TB6560 Stepper board.

Currently I have a pci-e Card to parallel installed (only this card, no other parallel card), no luck as well.

yeah, so starting from the beginning was the trick, I did not change the port in the ptest.hal file. Sorry I was not aware that I had to do this, I thought it would use parport0. I can check tomorrow if the detection of the inputs work now, I will give you final feedback.

Thank you very much for the quick reply!

Steffen wrote:

yeah, so starting from the beginning was the trick, I did not change the port in the ptest.hal file. Sorry I was not aware that I had to do this, I thought it would use parport0. I can check tomorrow if the detection of the inputs work now, I will give you final feedback.

Thank you very much for the quick reply!

That is something that should maybe be changed. I think the little parallel port testing configuration was made before the option of simply using 0 as the port address was an option in Linuxcnc.