Linux will not recognize my BOB no matter WHAT I try to do

Agreed Andy.

Tho I’m starting wonder.

Thank you for the responses. I appreciate it. I honestly expected there to be a learning curve with this OS. The problem is that the "learning curve" isn't the actual problem. Look at the picture I have attached. You are looking at 5 separate PC towers with an additional 3 hard drives for a total of 8 different hard drive/motherboard configurations that have ALL been loaded with either Linux Wheezy or Linux Buster. Some are 32 bit, some are 64. One has a built-in parallel port, the others have add-on PCIe adapter cards. There are 4 different PCIe adapter cards from 2 different manufacturers, the 2 sitting on one of the towers and the other 2 still installed in 2 of the towers. There are 4 different styles of breakout boards from 4 different manufacturers, and no combination of ANY of it works. NOTHING. That is just a LITTLE bit more than a "learning curve involved". Something else is obviously at play here The exact same problem manifests itself across all of the systems. I can find the parallel port and talk to it through the port tester, but LinuxCNC cannot find the exact same port it was just talking to.

The BIGGEST question that still persists is WHY did it all work FINE the VERY FIRST TIME I plugged it all in -- with the EXACT SAME hardware you are looking at in that picture -- , but now NONE of the combinations of any system I can put together will allow LinuxCNC to run? What HAPPENED??? It WAS working....

tommylight wrote:

From what i gathered throughout this topic, i am sure it is a user error, just can not figure out where or how.

Yes, at some level. First, if He's doing software stepping through hal_parport, then there is a test program for that.
The user must find the correct parport address and put that into the right hal file for either the test program or the
LinuxCNC configuration he's using. (That's done by default only for the stadard parport at 0x378.)

Then, there is the issue of assigning parport pins to step and direction functions. If the pinout is non-standard, then the
user has to edit the file that makes that linkage.

And, there is the issue of step and direction timing, the requirements vary by stepper driver and what the BOB does to the step timing.

Finally, one needs to determine the appropriate base thread period for a specific computer.

Any of these things could cause it not to work, as well as broken hardware, of course.

One has to approach this logically, and take a step by step approach, using the available diagnostic tools, to make each part work, and then build on that.

Here are some pertinent links:

linuxcnc.org/docs/html/config/stepconf.html
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Tweaki...ftwareStepGeneration

Jon

The main complaint the OP has is that the Port Address are not being recognised by linuxcnc. Tho he claims the parallel Port tester does work.

It would be nice to see a full error log.

But yes the inbuilt PP should work, maybe it isn't enabled in the BIOS or has been assigned an address other 0x378.

BeagleBrainz wrote:

The main complaint the OP has is that the Port Address are not being recognised by linuxcnc. Tho he claims the parallel Port tester does work.

Yes, but in the tester, I think you type the address in a GUI, but for the LinuxCNC config, you have to edit the .hal file.
I wonder if that is where he is going wrong?

Also, the "cannot find parallel port at address xxx" message is spurious, but may mislead the neophyte that the port can't be used.

Jon

This doesn't look quite right

setp stepgen.0.steplen 1
setp stepgen.0.stepspace 1

Get a Pico or Mesa board and let your troubles be gone.........

BeagleBrainz wrote:

This doesn't look quite right

setp stepgen.0.steplen 1
setp stepgen.0.stepspace 1

Oh my gosh! Good catch, there is the problem! Depending on the mode of the step generator, this could lead to extremely short step pulses. Possibly, the software might just lose the step pulses, too. These numbers are supposed to be in nano-seconds, so a 5 us step pulse (common value for many stepper drivers) would be 5000.

Jon

That should be OK

Minimum step pulse width is one base thread period if reset mode is not used
and the step time is determined by the reset time if reset mode is used.
Step length and step space are supposed to be 1 and 1 in reset mode.

Pretty hard to guess what going on without the full hal/ini files though.