Help! Do I have a bad 7i76e?

Greetings,

I've helped someone else set up a 7i76e for plasma usage -- flashed firmware with mesaflash, set up and tested, etc. I understand IP addressing very well, having worked in IT and sysadmin for more than 10 years. So I'm sure I don't have an IP address issue here. Here's the deal...

New 7i76e, trying to configure: Mesaflash reports "No 7I76E board found."

I have jumper W3 up and can ping 10.10.10.10. My computer's IP address is 10.10.10.100, subnet mask 255.255.255.0

Relevant part of `ifconfig`





Mesaflash was built from Github source code pulled this evening.


But Mesaflash can't find the board.


I tried two different computers, two different network adapters on one computer, two different ethernet cables. I just set up another 7i76e very recently without issue and this one is simply refusing to cooperate with me. Could I have received a dead unit? Is there a hard reset option I can try?

I have tried booting with jumper W9 in the Down position, with the same results.

When I ping the board, the green LEDs flash; a different one lights up with each ping response.

To make sure it is not only a mesaflash issue, I started the pncconf wizard but I can not get a motor to spin by using the Test Axis functionality either. Interestingly, when entering axis configuration testing, the lights on the Mesa board do flash. But I have no motion.

I've also tried IP address 192.168.1.121 (and yes, I set my computer manually to 192.168.1.100 while testing this). Same deal. I can ping 192.168.1.121 without problem (and the LEDs on the 7i76e flash with each ping) but mesaflash will not find the card and pncconf axis test will spin no motors.

You need to give the full card name now:

7i76e-16

You can get the full Ethernet card name with:

mesaflash --device ethernet --addr xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
 

Thanks so much, that was it! After banging my head against the wall for a couple hours last evening, this is a relief. Pardon me if this is something I should have been able to discover myself in docs or otherwise.

I'd seen the mesaflash help, which said "If no command is given it will detect board with given name and print info about it," and had tried various things but the keyword "ethernet" hadn't occurred to me to try.

Thanks for your patient response. Forum searching last night revealed that you have answered an awful lot of questions that simply ended up being IP address config misunderstandings.

Well this is my fault...

The way the name compares worked in Mesaflash previously
did not allow it to distinguish between the 7I96 and the new 7I96S
(which is really important since they use different FPGA chips)
so I changed mesaflash to compare the complete Ethernet card
name.

I just undid this for the 7i76e because it will cause too much
pain and suffering to require the full name  as "7i76e" always
worked before.

I don't mind if I need to specify the full card name, now that I know of the change. But I can see there would be a lot of forum posts, helpful PDFs created by users, etc that would all be out of date. Perhaps the advice, going forward, should be two-fold -- first, discover your card's name, then secondly use that name in your mesaflash commands. I think if I could have figured out how to use card discovery I would have probably been able to figure it out own my own.

Plasma firmware is flashed, my motors spin now, and I'm happy. Back to work again, one wire at a time... hopefully my first plasma table build will be shooting sparks before too long.