Mesa 5i20, Hostmot, can I trade stepgen for PWM?

Machine is a Lagun FTV-3 mill, currently have x/y/z all hooked up and tuned and its been working great with me just manually switching on the spindle, but of course I can't leave well enough alone. So I got myself a VFD for it and I am trying to get it integrated so the computer can run it all.

Right now I've got a 5i20 FPGA running 2x 7i29 motor drives on P2, a 7i37TA IO board on P3 and nothing yet on P4.

I got myself a Spinx1 the other day and hooked it up on P4 tonight, and realized that if I run the default configuration firmware in PNCConf I'm out of PWM channels to run the spinx1 for my VFD speed. But, I've got leftover stepgen channels that I don't think I'll ever use and don't want to give up any of my extra GPIO.

Do I just need to manually change this in my HAL file? I wasn't sure if it was PNCConf being out of PWM channels or what but I'd like to have 4 PWM channels on P2 and a single PWM on P4 to run the Spinx1, and even if I deselect a PWM channel (since I don't yet have a rotab for the 4th motor controller) on P2 I couldn't select one on P4. Just looking for some insight before I go editing my Hal file again and screw something up.

What firmware are you using?
The firmware defines what and where components are.

If may be that you can deselect the steppers (turning them to GPIO)
and change your current GPIO into PWM.

Otherwise you would require custom firmware - which is possible - Peter often does requests.

Chris M

If you are using a standard bitfile just give me the name of the bitfile and I can add a PWMgen to P4

PCW wrote:

If you are using a standard bitfile just give me the name of the bitfile and I can add a PWMgen to P4

I already switched it around in hardware, now need to get all my GPIO pins corrected and rewrite my HAL since I no longer need to enable the buttons & contactors I was using to run my spindle forwards/reverse. I was using SVST8_4 with the servos turned down to 4. I couldn't figure out if there was something I was doing wrong or just a limit of PNCConf, just could not get the last PWM to go anywhere but IO pin 031 on P3.

the firmware defines how the components are laid out.
The only option is to de-select components and then they can be used as GPIO.
This de-selection starts at the highest number component and works down.

The 5th PWM is defined to be on connector P3, pin 15
If you look at the output page on the help dialog, while on the mesa page, it should show you a run down of the firmware.

SO PNCconf was displaying it correctly. If you wish to have components in a different order/number custom firmware is required.

Chris M