Any other driver board choice except mesa board?

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23 Apr 2024 09:08 #298899 by cornholio

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23 Apr 2024 14:05 #298914 by jmelson
No, these USB to parallel adapters do not work properly as a stepper output.
You can get PCI or PCIe parallel port cards to plug into your PC motherboard.
There is also the Pico Systems universal stepper controller board (my product)..
Jon
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24 Apr 2024 01:24 #298956 by timaer
Got it .Thanks a lot!

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24 Apr 2024 13:35 #298999 by OttoDidact
I went to that page and they seem to also manufacture or are related to an affordable and attractive sounding controller. Expatria Technologies Flexi-HAL

FlexiHAL Isolated CNC Controller for GRBLHAL and LinuxCNC

expatria.myshopify.com/en-us/products/flexi-hal

I might be interested in this one myself. When I upgrade my router table. I'm using a C&CNC Bob that they stopped manufacturing years ago.

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24 Apr 2024 13:42 #299000 by OttoDidact
I searched GRBLHAL which I learned about from the FlexiHAL page. Seems like GRBL has come a long way and there is much more capability there than there used to be.

Not LinuxCNC, but might get you where you are going.

www.grbl.org/breakboards
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25 Apr 2024 03:22 #299040 by timaer
Yes ,GRBL is famous ,but not very suitable for my situation .I 'll develop a mathine with both lathe and 4 axis milling ,so GRBL board not completely satisfied

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30 Apr 2024 09:47 #299379 by timaer
Hi,I've read a few material about EtherCAT,and our boss of company also decided to use EtherCAT as the solution of building the cnc machine.But the linuxcnc seems not so much support to EtherCAT ,at least not offering the PncConf and StepConf wizard such like GUI panel and not very much turial about ethercat on the official document .The most useful thing I found is in the form EtherCAT section about the installation of the EtherCAT .so if I choose to use EtherCat to build the machine ,the biggest problem is I dont have many document or related material connecting with Linuxcnc,after all ,I need to use it to control the machine. Do you have any advice for a newbee,I'll appreciate it very much .

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30 Apr 2024 10:10 #299381 by tommylight
From your questions and replies, you should get an old PC with a parallel port and some drives/motors, install LinuxCNC and make that work, whatever that is.
Jumping into EtherCAT is OK if you are willing to persist and read a lot, the same goes for any hardware machine control.
I am sure you can get it working with the help of very good members on this forum, just follow directions and advice you get from them.
But if you expect wizards to do everything for you, just don't start. Wizards are just to give you a something to work with, they do everything for simple normal machines/controllers, but they can not do everything for thousands of hardware combinations out there.
Editing hal files is very easy, once you get familiar with it, and LinuxCNC is very, very good as everything can be seen/read/checked/tested/modified/even visualised with Vismach, so it does pay off to spend some time learning it.
The best thing is, in a factory i workded, we had a mill, lathe, plasma and a "profile machining" monstrosity, all with LinuxCNC and all used by a single person.

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30 Apr 2024 11:53 #299388 by rodw
There has been an enormous amount of work on ethercat recently that is in the ethercat linuxcnc driver
github.com/linuxcnc-ethercat/linuxcnc-ethercat
All of these new features are synced to the etherlabmaster repository via an auto build process. I believe that there are some emerging config tools.

Please review the documentation in the repo
github.com/linuxcnc-ethercat/linuxcnc-ethercat

Building a hal config from scratch is not that  hard if you have a template to start with. Back when I made my first machine there was no support in pncconf for the Mesa 7i6e so I had to do it this way.

You could use my example. A lot of guys got going with this github.com/rodw-au/linuxcnc-cia402

However, I think my xml file with the new changes could be simplified to this (with the bulk of the xml dealing with the IO module)
<masters>
  <master idx="0" appTimePeriod="2000000" refClockSyncCycles="1000">
    <slave idx="1" type="ECT60" name="j0">
      <modParam name="peakCurrent_amps" value="2.0"/>
      <modParam name="controlMode" value="openloop"/>
      <modParam name="homeOffset" value="1"/>
      <modParam name="input3Func" value="home"/>
      <modParam name="input6Func" value="emergency-stop"/>
      <modParam name="homeMode" value="17"/>
      <modParam name="homeAccel" value="500"/>
      <modParam name="homeSpeedFast" value="2500"/>
      <modParam name="homeSpeedSlow" value="500"/>
    </slave>
    <slave idx="2" type="ECT60" name="j1">
      <modParam name="peakCurrent_amps" value="6.0"/>
      <modParam name="controlMode" value="closedloop"/>
      <modParam name="homeOffset" value="1"/>
      <modParam name="input3Func" value="home"/>
      <modParam name="input6Func" value="emergency-stop"/>
      <modParam name="homeMode" value="17"/>
      <modParam name="homeAccel" value="500"/>
      <modParam name="homeSpeedFast" value="2500"/>
      <modParam name="homeSpeedSlow" value="500"/>
    </slave>
    
    <slave idx="3" type="generic" vid="00000a88" pid="0x0a880101" configPdos="false" name="IO">
      <dcConf assignActivate="300" sync0Cycle="*1" sync0Shift="0"/>
      <syncManager idx="2" dir="out">
        <pdo idx="1600">
            <!-- Digtial Outputs (RTEC1616)-->
              <pdoEntry idx="7000" subIdx="01" bitLen="16" halType="complex">
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-01" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-02" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-03" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-04" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-05" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-06" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-07" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-08" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-09" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-10" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-11" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-12" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-13" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-14" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-15" halType="bit"/>
                <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="out-16" halType="bit"/>
              </pdoEntry>
              <pdoEntry idx="7000" subIdx="02" bitLen="16" halPin="pwm_duty1" halType="s32"/>
              <pdoEntry idx="7000" subIdx="03" bitLen="16" halPin="pwm_duty2" halType="s32"/>
              <pdoEntry idx="7000" subIdx="04" bitLen="16" halPin="pwm_duty3" halType="s32"/>
              <pdoEntry idx="7000" subIdx="05" bitLen="16" halPin="pwm_duty4" halType="s32"/>
          </pdo>
          </syncManager>
          <syncManager idx="3" dir="in">
            <pdo idx="1A00">
              <!-- Digtial_inputs  -->
              <pdoEntry idx="6000" subIdx="01" bitLen="32" halType="complex">
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-01" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-02" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-03" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-04" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-05" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-06" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-07" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-08" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-09" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-10" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-11" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-12" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-13" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-14" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-15" halType="bit"/>
                  <complexEntry bitLen="1" halPin="in-16" halType="bit"/>
               </pdoEntry>
        </pdo>
      </syncManager>
    </slave>
  </master>
</masters>

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