Sieg KX3 and 5i25. Seeking firmware.

mooser wrote:

Not questioning but is there any reason for not using the charge pump feature?

The suggestion is definitely to use the charge-pump hardware. But driven by a stepgen on the FPGA card not by software.

mooser wrote:

I'm pretty much at the point where this switch over needs to go back to mach. Trying to wrap my poor old head around the Bitfile/hal and ini files is proving beyond my abilities.

Maybe we have just made a bad job of explaining things?

With a parallel port some pins are inputs and some pins are outputs. But other than those restrictions you can send step signals and direction signals from any pin. In HAL you see individual HAL pins corresponding to physical pins on the connector.

With the Mesa card any pin can be an input or an output, but the function of each physical pin is hard-coded in the bitfile. In the HAL layer you do not see HAL pins corresponding to the step and direction pins, you see the stepgen position or velocity inputs instead.
If you disable some step-generators in the firmware then the associated pins become available as GPIO pins (and can be individually configured as input or output) But you can only disable functions from the highest-numbered downwards.

The firmware you have has been configured with stepgens both for the spindle and the charge-pump.

I think that some of your trouble is that you are trying to make changes in Pncconf to achieve specific results in HAL, and in this regard Pncconf is something of an impenetrable black box.

Perhaps you need to become more familiar with HAL. Once you get used to it it is a very flexible and useful tool. Try this:
(Note that you can use the TAB key to autocomplete commands, for example loadr<tab> hostm<tab>)
Open a terminal window and type the following:
You should now have a live and working realtime system and powered-up Mesa card.
For reference you can make a list of all the Mesa card HAL pins:And all the setting (parameters)It is probably a good idea to copy these pin and parameter lists into a text file for later reference.
All the entries you see in the HAL file part of your config are commands that you can use in the HAL environment that you are now in.

One very simple example:should turn on an LED on the 5i25will turn it off again.

It should be possible to control the spindle using the HAL interface too. Something a bit like this (but I am guessing HAL pin names and config details). Control-type 1 sets the stepgen to speed control mode. The correct scale setting will depend on your peak spindle speed and the expectations of the G11G. Consider it an adjustment
You probably need to "setp" an IO pin to turn the spindle on, too. Changing velocity-cmd should change the spindle speed.

The point of this is twofold: To show that HAL is not complicated if you take it in small chunks, and to demonstrate that HAL is actually a fairly convenient place to try things out and debug without the complications if the rest of LinuxCNC.

The only other things you need to know to understand a HAL file that is part of a config is that [SECTION]ENTRY gets a value from the INI file (you can freely add your own sections, and ad your own entries to existing sections) and that the "net" command can be used to connect the output of one HAL function to the inputs of one or more other ones.

so:creates a HAL "signal" (which can have any name) to a LinuxCNC pin that sends spindle speed commands. (You won't have any motion pins in your command-line session, we haven't loaded the motion module)connect the same signal to the spindle stepgen. You can combine them both on one line, if you want, or you can make the connections in separate files. Every "signal" can be connected to one "writer" (output pin) such as spindle-speed-out and as many "readers" (input pins) as required.

mooser wrote:

If I do not want to re-wire the C11G I would need to find and flash a bitfile

I would suggest that it is far easier to re-wire the C11G. (and, as PCW pointed out, the C11G manual suggests X step and X dir belong on pins 2 and 3.)

Is the channel on the mesa card irrelevant and although pncconf will not allow odd pairing I can manually editing the HAL or INI or ??? and make different step/dir pairs

No, the pairs are hard-coded as pairs. When the target is less than the current position the step pin of that channel will pulse, and the dir pin will be set to reverse and vice-versa.

mooser wrote:

I guess I 'll have to see about rewiring / configuring under mach first to keep the machine running and then have another go at linuxcnc

That might be the best approach. Then it is just a case of moving a cable between computers.

Re-configuring pins in Mach and moving wires on the breakout should only take 15 minutes or so.

Further down the line you might want to add a spindle encoder, but the C11G doesn't have enough input terminals for that.