3 Servos and 1 Stepper on a 7i77 +5i25

Woohoo!

When I type in the following, it works! :

sudo ./oldmesaflash 5i25_7i77_7i76.bit write

It gives me the message: Board configuration updated successfully

Thanks very much to both of you guys!

Now to see if it will actually drive the motor...

I have been able to get the 4th axis to run if I connect it up to another parallel port on the same PC. If I use stepconf and set Pin 1 to A Step and Pin 2 to A Dir, I can drive the axis all day. Unfortunately, in the PNCConf, the setting that controls that is labeled: NUM 0, A Axis Stepgen.

If I leave the cable wired the same way, but connected to the P2 parallel port of the 5i25, when I push the jog button on the control, the display shows movement, but the motor only ticks forward one tick per press, and does not tick at all in the other direction.

It looks to me like the NUM 0 A Stepgen is mapped to a mystery pin that I have gotten close to, but not hit yet. I looked in the Help file for the PNCConf, and there is mention of a 7i76 on the P2 of the 5i25, but it refers to Step0- on pin 2 and Step0+ on pin 3. It also talks about Dir0- and Dir0+ pins, but I don't know why it's not analogous to the way that it is wired for another parallel port.

What am I missing?

Take look at the current dmesg output for the 7I76 stepgen pinout

(or the 5i25_7i77_7i76.pin file or the 7I76 manual page 4:P1 HOST INTERFACE CONNECTOR)

Sweet Moses, it works! Hopefully this thread will be a cautionary tale about jumping into the deep end before you can swim Thanks a million to Peter and Andy. You both have a lot of patience. Just to close this out officially, here's what unlocked everything in the pin file:

Here's the applicable portion of the pin file:

IO Connections for P2
Pin# I/O Pri. func Sec. func Chan Pin func Pin Dir

1 17 IOPort StepGen 0 Dir (Out)
14 18 IOPort StepGen 0 Step (Out)
2 19 IOPort StepGen 1 Dir (Out)
15 20 IOPort StepGen 1 Step (Out)
3 21 IOPort StepGen 2 Dir (Out)
16 22 IOPort StepGen 2 Step (Out)
4 23 IOPort StepGen 3 Dir (Out)
17 24 IOPort StepGen 3 Step (Out)
5 25 IOPort StepGen 4 Dir (Out)
6 26 IOPort StepGen 4 Step (Out)
7 27 IOPort SSerial 0 TXData4 (Out)
8 28 IOPort SSerial 0 RXData4 (In)
9 29 IOPort SSerial 0 TXData5 (Out)
10 30 IOPort SSerial 0 RXData5 (In)
11 31 IOPort MuxedQCount 3 MuxQ-IDX (In)
12 32 IOPort MuxedQCount 3 MuxQ-B (In)
13 33 IOPort MuxedQCount 3 MuxQ-A (In)

So for channel 0, which is what the PNCConf lets me pick, I ran the Pin1 and Pin14 wires to the motor driver and it works. That is all, and good night.

Your special powers are halfway there. Actually, one of the first things that I checked was whether the wires were reversed, and swapped them just to be sure. The main problem was that I was using wire 1 and wire 2, when I needed to be using wire 1and wire 14. I didn't know about the pin file that laid out how things were mapped. I'm just glad it's fixed. Enjoy your weekend.

Mr. Technical

I apologize for the mesaflash issues, I had just updated the dist files to the latest binary
without testing on Ubuntu 10.04. I have restored an earlier version of mesaflash to the
dist zip files and have included the newer binary (renamed mesaflash3) and the latest source

Hi Peter,

No worries about the mesaflash issue. You guys stuck with me to the end. Thanks for all the help!

Mr. Technical

I have almost exactly the same setup and need (5i25+7i77 and want to add a stepper 4th axis). The 7i76 seems like more than I need. Would the 7i75 work for this application? I'm looking through the 5i25 download but I don't see a bitfile for it.