Error,

Unfortunately, you are using non-standard board addresses, so the diagnostic program won't work properly.
The diagnostic is dumb, it will only test an encoder board at address 0, a DAC board at address 4 and a DIO board at address 6. So, if you change one of your encoder boards at a time to address 0, then you can test it with the commtest mode. Then, you can swap the address settings and try the other board.
If the commtest works OK, that will indicate that communication between the PC and the encoder boards is good.
If the commtest does not give a no errors report, then you have to debug further.

Jon

Also note that the new version encoder boards take up 2 addresses, so when you have that one at address zero, there should be no board at address 1. My usual setup is encoder boards at addr 0 and 2, DACs at addr 4 and 5, and DIOs starting at addr 6.

Jon

I moved the card addresses and here are the results.

What are the dip switches combination for addressing? Is there a chart?

1-1-1-1 =0 ??

Yes, on-on-on-on = address 0. Switch 1 is the least significant bit, switch 4 is the most significant. On the newer encoder cards, switch 1 has no effect, as the boards need to be addressed to an even address.

As for the tests in the previous message, these show that the new encoder card (addr 0) is working correctly, and all other cards appear at the expected address.

You could swap the addresses of the encoder cards to check the other card. Since you were having the relay clattering problem in LinuxCNC, I would at least run the DIOtest mode of the diagnostics to test the master DIO card. First, remove the SSR connectors (ST3 and ST4) to avoid clattering whatever these DIO boards control. Set the watchdog jumper on all DAC boards to OFF to allow this test to run. Make sure the E-stop loop is connected to the master DIO board, so the green LED is lit. Then run :

sudo ppmcdiags 378 diotest

it should give the same "no error" reports as the commtest. The red LEDs on the DIO board should flicker, this test loads random values to all SSRs and then reads back the setting to confirm it received the setting correctly. If this test runs OK, you could try it with each DIO board set to address 6 (making sure no other board is set to addr 6). The diagnostic only tests the DIO board at addr 6. If this all works OK, then it is seems likely that the sparking relay is causing so much electrical noise that it is resetting all the logic. I would try testing it with that relay disconnected to see if everything else works, and if so, then you will have to apply some transient suppressors or something to that relay.

Jon

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