Smart Serial port not detecting remote 7i87 card

  Finally got back to tracing the 7i87 wiring. The schematic was wrong but the actual wiring seems correct. I traced it from the 6i25 pins all the way to the 7i87 board and can't find an error.

I reflashed the 6i25 board and confirmed that the SSerial channel is installed. However, when I look at the hal configuration the SSerial pins just show as GPIO.

Do I have to do something in the HAL or INI files to get the smart serial module to work?

I'm attaching the corrected schematic for the RS485 converter.

is TXEN tied high?

It has a pullup resister to Vcc

Looks like you have TX and RX swapped:

Here is the schematic of the 7C81s local RS485 ports
(you don't need drive enable for sserial cards):

 

That doesn't look like the board I have which is a MESA ENC422 single channel with the jumper set to RS485.I couldn't find a schematic or data sheet for it so I'm going by the labels printed on the board. The TXEN LED lights up when under power.I tried to attach an image of it but it is too large. 

The wiring that's wrong is the wiring to the RJ-45

So, you are saying that

TX+ > TXB
TX- > TXA
RX+ > RXB
RX- > RXA

is wrong?

This is what I was using from the 7i87 manual:

SERIAL PORT PINOUT
J1 is the 7I87s serial interface. J1 is a RJ-45 jack. The serial interface pinout is
compatible with standard 8 wire CAT5 Ethernet cables. J1 pinout is as follows:
PIN SIGNAL EIA/TIA 568B COLOR
1 RXA ORANGE WHITE
2 RXB ORANGE
3 TXA GREEN WHITE
4 GND BLUE
5 GND BLUE WHITE
6 TXB GREEN
7 +5V BROWN WHITE
8 +5V BROWN

Yes, Tx connects to Rx, Rx connects to Tx

TX - Transmit
Rx - Receive

What triggers the smart serial channel to probe any attached cards?
Does it happen on power up? When linuxcnc starts?

Yes that's wrong.

You have to consider that for RS-422,
host TX --> remote RX and remote TX --> host RX

So a sserial host device (7C81 or your example) will have swapped
RX/TX pins relative to a sserial remote device (7I87 for example)