Gettings started with 7i80HDT and 7i48

Hello everyone,

I have a question regarding the combination of a 7i80HDT and a 7i48 which is a 6 channel analog servo interface. I chose this combination of cards because I am retrofitting a mill and have analog servo controllers from Kollmorgen. A more popular choice, I believe, would be the 7i97T which has been out of stock for a few months at all resellers here in Europe. I also bought a 7i42TA breakout card for the 7i80HDT.

Due to time constraints, the cards have been sitting patiently on my desk for a few weeks, but now I wanted to start experimenting with them. I have my servo controller working fine with the +-10V input.

My question now is how do I get the 7i80HDT - 7i48 combination up and running in LinuxCNC? I've looked at the downloadable files and there is no .bin file for this type of configuration. Do I need to clone a .bit file and edit it manually somehow? Or do I just need to go through the PnCConf steps to get everything up and running?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Adrian

 

Its not obvious, but 7i80hdt_svss6_8d.bin is a usable firmware file for a
7I80HDT and 7I48 (7I48 on P1)

 I would load the firmware into the 7I80HDT:

mesaflash --device 7i80hdt --addr 10.10.10.10 -- write 7i80hdt_svss6_8d.bin --reload

(assuming the suggested 10.10.10.10 ip address)

Then I would use pncconfs discovery option to  read the available card resources
to create the hal configuration.

Note that 7i80hdt_svss6_8d.bin firmware has 8 sserial channels on P3 so
I would use P2 for the 7I42TA (you can use p3 by specifically disabling
the sserial port in the hal file so the initial startup probe does not toggle any I/O bits.
 

Thanks for your quick response and clarification!

I would never have thought to use that particular firmware because, as you say, the naming is not obvious.

I have already played around with mesaflash and that worked fine, so hopefully next weekend I will be able to spin my servo for the first time through LinuxCNC.