Remora - ethernet NVEM / EC300 / EC500 cnc board

I think this project can become a good one, it will evolve

Hello tommyligth, I see that you have a lot of experience with MESA boards, just out of curiosity what optocouplers a 7i96 mesa board has for encoder input, greetings

At this point, Remora for NVEM/EC300/EC500 from my point of view is much better than the original Digital Dreams firmware. As Scott said, 6-axis DMAStepgen 500 kHz, 4 HW QDC encoder modules, all this for free, it is important to say, in my humble opinion Digital Dreams has used a great processor to not exploit it to the maximum and use cheap optocouplers in its design of PCB, having said that I think that Remora is a great project and offers possibilities that the original firmware of these boards for Mach3 does not have, greetings

The 7I96 does not use optocouplers for encoder input but rather a differential receiver.
Optocouplers are problematic for this use as they are poor differential receivers especially
if properly terminated.  In addition the interface normally needs to supply 5V to the encoder
which defeats the advantage of the isolation.

Hello PCW, I have never had a MESA board in my hands and I was curious, thank you, I have made a design for a connection board for encoders where I have used some quadruple differential line receiver AM26c32 and some quadruple digital isolator ISO7700, it also incorporates some DC-DC converters 5V and 3V3 for powering the encoders and logic, it would be good to have your opinion about this design, I leave you a link to the post where I shared this design here in the forum, thank you

Looks OK, You can also use the 26LS32s for single ended by
providing a reference voltage and a jumper. The old
LSTTL 26LS32s tend to be more rugged than the newer CMOS
versions as they will accept +-25V common mode spikes
without damage and the CMOS versions are damaged by
>14V or so.

Thanks PCW, it is good to have your opinion on the design, I will replace the C series with the LS series for the differential receivers, I plan to have some boards manufactured by jlcpcb, greetings

Is there isolation on the Mesa boards between the differential driver signals and MCU ?