Pimping the mini-lathe

What does
uname -a
say?
Glxgears should be there but in case they are not, they are in the mesa-utils package, so
sudo apt install mesa-utils
Latency should still be OK for a Mesa board, but do connect the Mesa to it and leave it running for a while, might still have excursions greater than that.
Isolcpus did not improve much on the latency front for me on new-ish PC's but your mileage may wary, but it will make the Pc sluggish.

tommylight wrote: What does
uname -a
say?
Glxgears should be there but in case they are not, they are in the mesa-utils package, so
sudo apt install mesa-utils
Latency should still be OK for a Mesa board, but do connect the Mesa to it and leave it running for a while, might still have excursions greater than that.
Isolcpus did not improve much on the latency front for me on new-ish PC's but your mileage may wary, but it will make the Pc sluggish.

linux minilathe 4.19.106-rt44-lcnc #1 smp preempt rt thu mar 5 00:02:34 aedt 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86-64 gnu/linux

It has run for about four hours without freezing, which is an improvement. Latency is up to 128000 on the servo thread.

I'll reboot it now, install glx gears and run a latency test over night.

Ouch, I was wondering why youtube played for four hours with nothing more than pizza wheels of doom. The glxgears returns 301 frames in 5 seconds = 0.004 fps. Glad I am not playing an online game. I'd be a sitting duck.
Edit - weird, a second glx gears is pretty stable around 60 FPS

RotarySMP wrote: The glxgears returns 301 frames in 5 seconds = 0.004 fps.

301:5=60.something_not_important
????

PCW wrote: The as shipped 7I96 has the 7i96d.bit bitfile loaded
This has 5 stepgens and no PWM.

To load 7i96d_1pwm.bit you would need to fetch the 7i96.zip archive from Mesa,
extract the 7i96d_1pwm.bit bitfile and run these commands:

mesaflash --device 7i96 --addr [the cards current ip address] --write 7i96d_1pwm.bit
mesaflash --device 7i96 --addr [the cards current ip address] --reload

Do I first use PNCConf to set up the connection, IP address etc between the PC and 7i96, and then flash it with the PWM bitfile, or do I have to manually configure the connection and then flash it, before using PNCConf?

Is the Ethornton 7i96 configuration tool still the way to do it, like in this video from ~6minutes?


Well, that video helps. I jumpered for the fixed IP address of the EEPROM, and set a fic IP address as DEAD IO showed there, and now have them connected and the PWM bitfile flashed. I am still a bit unsure whether it is better to use that one Ethornton configuration widget, as I thought PNCConf has now been revised to configure a 7i96.

Either way, I am not off to buy a new (used) camera (panasonic G81) as the current video set up with the older Olympus EM10 I am not too happy with. I'll continue with the 7i96 tomorrow.