Hi Tom,
I bought a couple of these little drives years ago, thought I would see if I could use them to drive some small gearmotors I have. So glad to see you have already “plowed that ground”. It seems from your ‘servo_mesa_bts7960.hal’ file that you did not use a daughterboard, but instead a BoB directly to the FPGA.?
-Doug
No BOB, i just wire stuff directly to mesa.
In this case, a parallel port cable with one plug removed and wired to encoders and drives.
Still have that setup somewhere in the shop.
I’m so glad you shared that Tom. It really helps to know there are others who will “whack & jack” cables to suit the immediate needs. I started this effort thinking I would need to use a 7i85s daughterboard but, when I try to direct the pwm stuff to the 7i85s I get errors like “Pin 'hm2_7i92.0.7i85.0.1.pwmgen.00.value' does not exist”.
I’ve only started to use other board arrangements quite recently. I have a functioning 5i25+7I77for a few years, and with some of the newer boards not supported by pncconf I’m finding that I don’t understand as much as I thought I did.My set up so far; I flashed the 7i92t with ‘7i92t_7i85s_5abobd.bin’ it has only 1 pwm module, which I think is ok for now since I’m only going to drive 1 motor. I have merged a pnccconf created hal file with the relative info from your hal file and I can get L.Cnc to load. But when I start working in the 7i85 I get the load errors.This really exposes my patchy knowledge of hal and the firmware bit files and several questions. I’ll only ask one (for now).Question:When do daughterboards get mapped in the with hal pin and parameter names and when not?I use my pcncconf created 5i25+7i77 hal& ini files as a working reference. The motor encoders are connect to the TBs on the 7i77 but there is nothing in the hal file showing the 7i77 together with the 5i25 mapping each of the individual channels (A,B,index).
I compare that to the feed override hand encoders and I can see the mapping work there. (See the) screenshotsI’m missing something fundamental, I have sadly not been able to read myself out of this one. My reference material is the
Mesa HostMot2 Driver (linuxcnc.org)
I’m hoping my L.CNC brother(s) can help. I’m back sitting on the noob stool.-Doug
Passive daughtercards like 7I85/7I85S do not add their name to
hal pin/parameter names so for example encoders, pwmgens, stepgens
only have the hm2_5i25.0.xxxxxx name.
Note that the 7i85s_5abob configuration has only one PWMgen and it drives
the 5ABOBs analog output.
To see all available Mesa hardware pins/parameters in a running LinuxCNC
system, open a terminal and type:
halcmd show all hm2
To save the list in a file as a copy/paste source, type:
halcmd show all hm2 > hardware_pins_and_parms.txt
To show what BOB pins, each PWM, stepgen etc is connected to type:
Hi peter, Thanks for the info. It really helps!. I’m running an old version of mesaflash on my l.cnc 2.7 machine. --dbname works great on the 2.9 machine. Would I do an apt-get update mesaflash to get the 2.7 machine up to same version? I’m always reluctant to update anything once I have things working.-Doug
