Easy question about MESA 7i43

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03 Aug 2017 02:41 #96955 by systemslave
I have what I think is a simple question. I am a hobbyist playing with my Sherline lathe. That means I know that I am wasting time and money for pleasure. I compares well with golf.

My lathe has the standard two steppers, spindle motor, and several limit switches. I built a home-brew spindle encoder and made it thread. Then I got involved building a 3d printer and forgot about the lathe project for a while. Recently I have ordered a MESA 7i43 and plan to switch to a cheap import encoder with far more resolution that the 16 ppr encoder that I made. Actually the encoder that I made started with better resolution but I had to reduce it in order to read it from the parport. Now it sounds like a fun project to hook up a real encoder.

Here is the easy question part - I am thinking that the 7i52s would be the right daughter board to couple with the 7i43. Am I wrong in thinking that it would;
  • read a real shaft encoder
  • provide 0-10v for the VFD
  • read all the current switches and allow me to add more
  • provide step/dir for the two stepper motors
  • be reasonably easy to implement in LinuxCNC

Would there be a better daughter board for the purpose? Thank you in advance.

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04 Aug 2017 10:30 #96998 by andypugh
7i52S should work, but it is bigger than your lathe :-)

You _can_ connect encoders direct to the 7i43 GPIO pins There is a little more risk.
However, it does mean that you can pin things out to suit the firmware rather than finding a firmware to suit the cards.
The following user(s) said Thank You: systemslave

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04 Aug 2017 15:49 #97006 by systemslave
Thank you for your reply Andy. I know that I am using the lathe as an excuse to play with the electronics.

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04 Aug 2017 16:05 #97007 by andypugh
My first lathe conversion used p-port first, then switched to 7i43.
I used ULN2003 chips to buffer outputs, and drove inputs directly. I needed pul-ups in some cases.

I made it all re-configurable and plugable, but that was a waste of time as I never did.
goo.gl/photos/pyhJBojPvzFD29e96

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04 Aug 2017 16:34 #97008 by systemslave
That is a beautiful project. Metal housing, nice wire routing and containment.

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