Documentation example for 5i25 + 7i77 + 1 servo

No love for the parallell port cards then? =)

The topic title says it all: 5i25 + 7i77 + 1 servo

No room for parallel port. We are making a machine not a toy (lot of comments will follow due to this sentence).
More serious, we sell Mesa cards and we sell it proudly as we really thing they are good (all our retrofits and machine are sold with those products). We sell also Argons, for the same reason, a good product, so we are documenting this set up.

It might be a good idea to make your tutorial, based on using the example 5i25/7i77 config file available here freeby.mesanet.com/7i77.zip. The basics are pretty much all there. Just need a good walk through on what wires to connect where and why. Should be a good start for most people. If you really want to be thorough include a walk through of the hal and ini files as well.

Some times, there is something to be said for not making things too easy, some people just shouldn't be messing with stuff like this.

andypugh wrote:

emcPT wrote:

No room for parallel port. We are making a machine not a toy

I think he was meaning 7i43 / 7i90 setup.

I was. =)

My personal opinion, YMMV:

- I hate videos 99% of the time. You are forced in someone elses speed which is either too slow or too fast but never just right, you have to sit out uninteresting parts because when you skip you might miss something interesting, topic coverage is narrow, there are no links to other useful information and you cannot print a useful page and ducttape it to the machine-to-be
- Most people without a background in software or electrical engineering hate editing text files such as the HAL/INI files.

If it can be done with PnCConf, that would be best.,

When I started with the 5i25/7i77 I tried PnCConf, but without much luck. 5i25/7i77 needed something extra to be recognised back then and there was such an overload of checkboxes and options I didn't understand back then that I had no idea how to get a working config with PnCConf. That is even the case today: 7i77 analog output TB5 is described as PWM, I can invert them, and there is a text such as 'Pulse Width Gen-P'. Now I know, but back then? Highly confusing.

So I started from scratch. But I already had LinuxCNC experience with the previous mill and manually altered/handcrafted bits of HAL logic.
Many bits of information helped, but two are worth noting:

- The Mesa experiments from this guy
- The hm2-servo config from Ted Hyde.

But all in all I think that a document describing how to get things up and running using PnCConf makes the most sense.

Documentation is now ready.
The machine working, witch the documentation was based on (but with more 2 axis and a THC) can be seen at:





more videos will follow if anyone interested.