7i43 and firmwares

Hi,

In a near future, I plan to buy a MESA 7i43 board, in order to extend my parport (I bought a IBM M51 mini PC, which has a free PCI slot I planned to use to add a parport card, but I think I will have to use this PCI port to plug a video card, as I have latency issues which certainly come from the onboard video card).

What I understand is this board needs a firmware in order to work with EMC (FPGA bitsrtream). And there are several firmwares (servo/stepperer).

The question is: what is it possible to do with the additionnal I/O pins (other than the servo/stepper dedicated ones)? Is it possible to use them as we can use the parport ones? For example, is it possible to use them as PWM output? I guess there are timing restrictions, due to the fact that EMC needs to communicate with the FPGA to ask it to switch pin on/off...

Thanks,

Frédéric

any pins not used for pin specific hardware functions are available as general purpose IO and can be used for any purpose
pwm is a pin specific function and therefore available on most firmware builds.

timing is much less of a problem with mesa products , as most of this is generated from within the firmware driver

confusion often relates to mesa products as people try to relate to using a parrell port breakout , this is not the case , their is much more going on underneath
and is much more flexiable in it's use .

i would also suggest using an addon card to the 7I43 , it make the job of connections so much easier
i.e the 7i42TA for example

Ok, I understand, now!

And, yes, I plan to buy a 7i42(TA) card too.

Thanks for your answer.