not understanding where to attach physical wires

I got a sample configuration to load in my computer. I have been through all the manuals, at least 100 times, and I am just not getting the part about hooking up wires to the 7i85 daughter board.

I have 5i25, 7i85 and 8i20 brushless servo drive powered up with the LEDs lit up as they should be.

I am confused by the dmesg. It lists pin numbers followed by numbers in parentheses . These numbers sort of look like they match up with the picture on page 6 of the 7i85 manual, except the labels are different.

The labels list something about muxed encoders, but the 7185 manual shows 3 encoder connectors and 5 serial communication connectors.

Looking at servogreen.hal I see only one place to connect a wire-GPIO 25 for the home switch.

on jog.hal I don't see any places to attach wires.

I have been told that the setup wizard will not work for my cards.

One thing at a time...

A good first step might be to connect encoder 0

According to the manual (pages 3 and 6) this connects to 7I85 pins 1 through 8 on TB3:

Thank you for your response. The encoder hookups make perfect sense to me , so I will go ahead and do that.

I got the encoder connected and it seems to work. The display counts up and down when I turn the motor by hand.

When I enable the 8i20 brushless servo drive the motor starts to turn slowly and continuously with low power. I can stop it with my fingers. (I have the drive belt off.)

I don't know how to home it.

Looks like the sample config is set up for magnetic (Thump) BLDC commutation init
(thats the "q" option) so it may in fact have initialized the motor commutation

If it continues to turn, thats a good thing (that means commutation is working)
But this is somewhat unlikely as these BLDC parameters would have to match your motor/encoder

from the sample file:

setp bldc.0.initvalue .3
setp bldc.0.scale -4000
setp bldc.0.poles 4

This is setup for a 1000 line (4000 count) encoder and a 4 pole motor
(it would also work to a 8 pole motor with a 2000 line encoder)

Do you know the encoder counts and number of motor poles?

Note that the motor current is quite limited until the NVMaxCurrent is set to the 8I20s
maximum (30A) but this is probably a good thin at this point

It has a 2048 encoder and the motor is 8 poles.

OK so that means that you need:

setp bldc.0.initvalue .3
setp bldc.0.scale -8192
setp bldc.0.poles 8

If you have not already done so

note that the scale may need to be reversed (to 8192) depending on you final axis
directions, and encoder connections

I did that, no change yet.

does the motor run continuously when enabled?