New ethercat / probe basic control for minimonster

it wont update the bios cause it cant find the usb drive.

I'm going to eat a pizza and scream for a bit.

Haha.

Mmm, pizza fixes everything.

For the curious who might want to use lenovo tiny pcs:
- The pc needed a bios update to disable CSM mode. (legacy compatibility) and turn secure boot off.
- The bios needed to go on a bootable DOS stick, which was not super clear in the instructions and its been AGES since that was a thing haha so I just forgot.
- Once I got the bios on I still needed to reinstall linuxcnc cause I guess the boot record was still messed up.

After all that, its fine. Now to do the work I intended to do like 11 hours ago!

I need a nap.

11 hours you've done well!....

Hmm. Seems I cant really do much without having the drives here. But how deal with the rs485 for the spindle?

I see some people using usb adapters, but I have a real serial port as well, can that be used instead?

Yes, much better! Buy a serial port to RS485 adapter rather than a USB one.

Aussie link for example
core-electronics.com.au/rs-232-to-rs-485...hSu9V9RoC41AQAvD_BwE

Apparently the serial is through a special cable on these, not just the normal 2x12 board pins and those cables are are and expensive. sigh.

How much worse is the usb adapter? This is not a critical application really so if it lags some milliseconds I don't think it matters. The most critical thing is being able to respond to an alarm and stop the machine.