5 axis 9 stepper mesa board selection

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18 Mar 2023 06:45 #266973 by jimmyrig
I'm building a 5 axis,  9 stepper machine and was curious what was the best way to go about it with mesa boards. Will need 5ish output, 15ish input and an analog out for vfd (anyone use the rs485 port on a mesa 7i96s to control a drive that way?) 

Seems like the 7i96s will do 5 steppers.....so use two of those? The description and manual make it sound like you can add another step/direction card onto the 7i96s to get more stepper motors..... Would a gekko g540 work.. Maybe a cheap breakout board or 7i76? If so how do you program it?

Other option seems to be the 7i92 with 2 breakouts, 7i76 and g540

Finally we have the 7i80 which would be ideal but it's out of stock.... Seems like that one hasn't been made with the new fpga yet.... Any eta? 

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Thanks for the help. 

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18 Mar 2023 10:31 #266978 by tommylight
Mesa 7i96S with 5 steppers and G540 with included 4 steppers should do just fine, although i can not recall how many inputs G540 has? I think it had only 2 outputs.
Mesa 7i85S should add 4 stepper outputs, i think, never used one so not sure.
Mesa 7i84 will add 32 inputs and 16 outputs and wire to Mesa 7i96S through smart serial, leaving the IDC header free for other stuff or G540. There are also 7i70 with 48 inputs, 7i71 and 7i72 with 48 outputs each but one has sinking the other has sourcing outputs.
A bit of warning, not sure what the situation now is with G540, but the old ones had division by 10 inputs, so for precission stuff it was not good, hence i stopped using them. Pitty as they are a capable neat package and i newer understood why they did that, nor got a reasonable answer from them back then.
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18 Mar 2023 18:20 #267021 by PCW
One option would be a 7I96S+ a generic "5 Axis BOB" using the
7i96s_5abob.bin firmware
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19 Mar 2023 01:14 #267041 by jimmyrig
Thanks, I was able to digup a 5 axis bob from the stash, got the mesa 7i96s flashed, all seems good from that side of things.

Changed the axis to 10 in the hal file and it boots linuxcnc. Added UU and VV with the corresponding joints.....think the hal and ini files are good as Lcnc says things are moving when home all is clicked but I got nothing on the bob side of things. All axis on the mesa side work. Will troubleshoot wiring later....gonna plug the bob into a Parallelport to make sure it works

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19 Mar 2023 01:17 #267042 by tommylight
Picture of the BOB?

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19 Mar 2023 01:35 #267047 by PCW

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19 Mar 2023 02:40 #267050 by tommylight
That one has buffers on the outputs to drives and optocouplers on the inputs, so should do just fine.
Some other with optocouplers on all outputs and inputs will work only if timings are very loose, slow optos. The max i could get from these was 10KHz and the signal was terrible on the scope.

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19 Mar 2023 18:01 #267093 by andypugh

 (anyone use the rs485 port on a mesa 7i96s to control a drive that way?) 

 

I am working on it. I got a Modbus relay board working from a Mesa UART last night. 

The aim is to create something configurable, which is likely to take a while (ie the quick-and-dirty demo above does not indicate that the finished driver is imminent) 
 
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20 Mar 2023 07:40 #267118 by rodw
Awesome work Andy. Will be great for VFDs and some Plasma cutters

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21 Mar 2023 23:09 #267260 by jimmyrig

 (anyone use the rs485 port on a mesa 7i96s to control a drive that way?) 

 
I am working on it. I got a Modbus relay board working from a Mesa UART last night. 

The aim is to create something configurable, which is likely to take a while (ie the quick-and-dirty demo above does not indicate that the finished driver is imminent) 



 

Looks great! I dont mind helping with the dev/testing. Once its to the point it'll take a modbus command let me know! Are you using modbus2hal? 

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