5i25 - 7i76 support testers wanted

ok great! thanks for testing. did the 7i76 need to be selected for sserial 0 or 1 ?
looking forward to all feedback.

You would need to use the sserial selections if you are using the 48 I/O points.

7I76 field I/O will be on SSERIAL 0 (SSERIAL 1 is the 7I76's SSERIAL expansion port)
SSERIAL 2 and 3 will be on the second (internal) 5I25 connector

thanks Peter.
My intention is to have it automatically configure sserial 0 for the 48 i/o points, now that I know it's sserial 0
when I get back from Mexico time

I've got the new CNC machine on the workbench right now, booting NFS root from another machine. Kernel 2.6.35.9, RTAI from CVS, emc-dev. Letting latency-test run for the day, while I keep my 2 year old entertained.

I'll be working on getting the 5i25 and 7i76 set up this evening and beyond. Hoping to have it replace the current parport bit-bang set up as soon as possible!

There's 'scope beside the machine, and root SSH if you want to play with some hardware. I am also on vacation for a bit (what could be nicer than staying home doing CNC stuff?).

What will it take to get the spindle control going?

if you mean for pncconf then just some coding time.
If you mean to do it your self that depends on what you are controlling and how you would like to control it.
PID control?
simple open-loop analog?
to a VFD?
some other controller?
basically I assume it will be just a variation of what is used for PWM control as far as software is concerned (substituting the 7i76 spindle component pins of course).

Open-loop to a VFD, 0-10V. It's a 3 axis gantry router machine. Guess I was thinking in particular the 0-10V output on the 7i76.

Sounds like it's already supported by HAL, I'll just have to add it in manually after running pncconf?

I got to a pretty successful first stage last night, running the latest 2.5-pre from the buildbot (pncconf was shown as "beta 1"), on 10.4. I had some initial difficulty because after I had placed the 5i25 .bit files in /lib/firmware/hm2/5i25, and then put the custom_firmware file on my desktop, I was still unable to select the correct firmware for the 5i25. After much frustration, I realized that it was because I'm on a new installation, and the .pncconf-preferences file had not been created yet. Since my system only has one Mesa card, and no active parallel port, I was stuck in a bit of a chicken/egg problem - I couldn't use the new firmware definition location until the .pncconf-preferences file had been created, but I couldn't create that file without generating and saving a valid config. Eventually I was able to manually create that file, and one post here on the forum showed what line it needed to have to search the custom_firmware file. After that, things went well. I wonder if creating that .pncconf-preferences file should happen on startup, rather than when saving a config? Might make more sense for new installs.

I still need to hook the card up to the rest of the machine to try a stepper tune, but that should only be a week or two off. Thanks for putting the early development work into this configuration - I suspect that it will be a popular pair of cards based on their low cost, and their pre-configuration that is ideal for lots of simple machines.

I'm looking forward to pncconf spindle support, too. I'm still an EMC2 newbie, and while I'm sure I'll be learning more than I want to know about HAL, I appreciate as much assistance as possible from pncconf in getting that set up. My spindle control will be ENABLE/CW/CCW/BRAKE, 0-10V (or 0-5V) to the VFD, with encoder feedback to the 7i76 (single pulse, no quadrature, with index).

-Sam