Mesa SoftDMC homing question

Hello,

I've been looking at the Mesa cards for my gantry build, but also think they might be a good solution for another machine (non cnc - more robot like) I would like to write some software for. It has 8 axis (all steppers) so I was planning on a 7I92 Ethernet Anything I/O card with two 7I47 Stepper daughter cards.

Can you configure SoftDMC to know the inputs for your home and end travel sensors & then SoftDMC can home an axis with an ethernet command? My assumption is that this can be done, but is it a default type of operation with just some simple FPGA configuration, or is it more of a R&D effort? In LinuxCNC, does the Mesa interface handle homing & over travel, or does the pc side software handle that?

My desire is to configure the 7I92 to act as a simple position controller & I feed it just a few commands over the ethernet, namely Home and Axis Position. If I tell it to move too far, it would of course stop at end point and report back warning/error ect.

Thanks,

Len

Tommy,

Thanks for the info. I should have specified on this project I wouldn't be using linuxcnc, but rather my own code. I was trying mostly to determine if my code needed to read limit switch inputs and handle homing and such, or would softdmc do a lot of that under the hood.

Ideally, I just send a packet over the link to have softdmc move to location x, and it happens within the bounds of my home/end travel sensors. If I need to also handle the sensors in my code, that's fine, but given the option, I would rather softdmc handle it. I would think at the least, soft dmc must handle some of these inputs for safety concerns. If the link goes down, SDMC im sure stops motion. It follows that you could tell it to stop on an input going hi as well.

I may be over thinking this.

Len

You can use a 7I47 with a 7I93 however

7i93 (50pin) was what I had in my head with a 7i47 behind it. I just placed an order for those 2 and the Servo 7i33TA interface. These three should let me play around with some of my hardware.

Thanks for the feedback.

Len