Help me use two 7i96s in Ethernet switch to control 6 joints

 Hello. Recently I’ve had problems controlling XYZAB because in fact I have two YY motors, so I need 6 Stepgens to avoid some issues I was having.  I added a 7i96s card and a switch, and added 10.10.10.11 and 10.10.10.12 in the Ethernet connections, also with gate 8. I’m not sure how to proceed with the ini/hal changes, tried some ideas around adding a second card IP, card1 read and write, and others, but no matter how, I couldn’t power up the system with both cards. Is there a base config o could work with to have both cards working? Any tips in having both cards working? I can ping both IPs, but I’m not sure if i won’t have other connectivity issues. Thank you in advance.

I know you already have two 7i96 cards, but perhaps using only one of them with a 7i78 daughter card connected to the expansion port of the 7i96 might be a better option than the two 7i96 cards to get extra stepgen outputs?

Did you change the IP address on one of the 7i96 cards so that they are not the same? Set the first as 10.10.10.10 and the second as 10.10.10.11. You have to use the Mesa flash utility to set the address on the card. Set the static IP for the nic on your Linuxcnc PC to 10.10.10.100 (or something other than 10.10.10.10 or 10.10.10.11 but in the same range.)

I believe you can use a switch, but the switch and the PCs ethernet port need to be dedicated only to this use. If you want to also have an ethernet network/internet connection you will need a second nic on the pc for that.

Here's a thread with instructions from Peter at Mesa
www.forum.linuxcnc.org/38-general-linuxc...sa-7i92-via-ethernet

Todd wrote:

I believe you can use a switch, but the switch and the PCs ethernet port need to be dedicated only to this use. If you want to also have an ethernet network/internet connection you will need a second nic on the pc for that.

 

I have not tried that recently, but it has worked for me in the past. I had two Mesa cards connected to a switch, each with its own address.

When I tried connecting other devices to that switch, (modbus tcp, etc), that did not work. Those needed an additional NIC.

Some switches do not behave. I tried using a router instead of a switch one time, that did not work either.