Another Newbie with PCIE parallel port problems

Pin 2 to pin 10.
Pin 10 or 11 or 12 or 13 or 15 to ground.
Not pin 2 to ground

cmelojr wrote: If I run sudo lspci -v then the ports show up as disabled.

Googling for that line of the output gave me this link:

forum.linuxcnc.org/49-basic-configuratio...rralel-port-disabled

Have you checked to see if the slot or port is disabled in the BIOS?

cmelojr wrote: If I run sudo lspci -v then the ports show up as disabled.

Here's my success report with the same PCIe card (SYBA SD-PEX10005 board product incorporating the ASIX MCS9900 chip, which is an "PCIe to Multi I/O(4S, 2S+1P) Controller" according to the Product Brief ). It worked on the first try, so perhaps my notes will help you find some difference with your observations. This was tested on a fresh, plain install of LinuxCNC 2.7.14 from the current live/install image. After the plain install, the only modifications I made to the LinuxCNC configuration was to copy and configure (for I/O address) the ptest works as shown below.

I installed the card (which I happened to have purchased from the same Amazon link as in your original post) into my ASRock Q1900B-ITX motherboard (has been successful in LinuxCNC application with just its one onboard parallel port that shows up at 0x378). The BIOS still configures the onboard port, but nothing shows up in the BIOS configuration for the PCIe gadgets.

Another qualification on this board tested: what I received from Amazon 03/2019 was not the type shown in the listing photo or on sybausa.com photos as the model SD-PEX10005. Those photos show a diagonally mounted chip, whereas what I received was a layout where everything is rectangular. I suspect that the rectangular version is a later build (which ought to have a distinctive model number, but doesn't), and is actually a reduction of the SD-PEX50030 (which is a board that has the serial port off-chip support components and comes with a 2nd bracket with a pair of DE-9P connectors to connect to them) with the serial port parts not populated. The rectangular board has an indicia "EM9900-I2(100720) MADE IN CHINA" on the back traces. Given that Taiwan (ASIX), China, India (MosChip), and Syba (California importer) have a hand in this product, it's no surprise that the critical engineering details are poorly documented and controlled, but that's the situation with support for the vintage parallel port concept. Another puzzle is that the upper right of the board has an unpopulated DC-DC converter circuit, which I assume is what generates the +/- voltages for RS-232C. The MosChip chip provides all the signals as 3.3V GPIO levels, and the support circuits have to shift this to RS-232C. The parallel port signals appear to be directly connected to the GPIO signals and levels. This suggests that all the serial port signals and GPIO pins are available on the board, at 3.3V GPIO levels; perhaps these could be wired out to harvest another dozen signal pins out of the board beyond the parallel port set.

I guessed the address needed for HAL as 0xe010 as shown in the "sudo lspci -vv" output which was:

Based on this output reporting "I/O ports at e010", I edited the ptest configuration ptest.hal as follows:


With ptest running, a voltmeter across ground and any given output pin would read 0.7mV (button off) and 3.3V (button pressed) when pressing the ptest output buttons, and shorting the input pins with a 470ohm resistor to ground would switch the ptest pin display from on (when open) to off (when shorted).

This hardware (motherboard with parallel port, power supply, 4GB DDR3, 1U rackmount case, 2nd parallel port PCIe) costs about $250 to assemble new, plus whatever hard drive you want to use. It all fits decently in the 1U format. I would suggest this street price is an upper bound to what you can potentially save by rummaging and struggling with an existing system.

on the PCIE there are 2 Parports
as the output shows
Region 0: I/O ports at e010
Region 1: I/O ports at e000

Lenovo have a habit of "blacklisting hardware"........usually your system wont boot when this happens.

I'd suggest trying some Lenovo support forums. (You may blow their minds if you say you are a linux user...if asked which distro just say debian.

For some reason it appears to be disabling those particular I/O ports.
Have you tried the card in different slots ?

Wow thanks for all the replies. I haven't had any luck with it yet. The BIOS are no help at all. There's no options to turn on/off that could help/hurt. They're very basic. I bought a different card that should be here tonight. I did read another thread where another user had a similar issue and fixed it by trying another card. I'll report back if it works.

Thanks!