Mesa 7i95t and 7i83 Analogue servo card

 
I have my Raspi5 booting from SSD, and very impressed with its speed.
Have installed the current mesact 2,1,3, and it finds my 7i95T, but 7i83 isn't in the pull down.
So selected 7i77 as the daughter board, and get a PI 7i77 tab and can put enough numbers in an X axis setup to be able to save the config.

Starting Linuxcnc, and calling my minimal config errors with :-
./main.hal:211:Pin 'hm2_7i95.0.7i77.0.4.analogout3'

The advice above is to manually edit the configurations files and change the references from 7i77 to 7i83,
Editing the reference in the 7i95t_XYZ.ini, doesn't result in the mesact 7i77 tab being renamed, and there are dire warnings that manually editing the main.hal will result in mesact overwriting and otherwise ignoring.

When I do manually edit the two files and replace all 7i77 references with 7i83,
I get nominally the same error.
./main.hal:211:Pin 'hm2_7i95.0.7i83.0.4.analogout3'

I assume therefore that the 7i83 has some other way to refer to its 'things'.

halcmd show all  with both cards powered and connected linuxcnc running in demo mode shows a lot of data, but
halcmd show all hm2 shows nothing, so I am stuck.

I need some very baby steps  please,

Thanks

The command would be:

halcmd show all | grep 7i83

(While LinuxCNC is running)

You can also use halshow to look through the pin and parameter trees


 

Nope, still nothing.
I am running linuxcnc axis sim, is that enough to get access to these cards from the halcmd?

NT4Boy wrote:

Nope, still nothing.
I am running linuxcnc axis sim, is that enough to get access to these cards from the halcmd?
 

No

Ok, got it.
I have to edit the hal file to comment out the analog lines.
Then I can call the config without the error, and now I get grep 7i83 data.

Not sure what to do with it....!

You can use the 7I83 pins and parameter names to verify the correct names in your hal file

You can even copy/paste them from a file created with:

halcmd show all | grep 7i83 > 7i83.txt

Exactly. I've printed it already..

That's a huge step for me, thanks for your patience.

So I guess, that I need to go back to mesact, call up the 7i77 again, enter as much machine info as I can for all axes and the spindle, and from then on I am away from that GUI and into text.

In mesact, with the 7i95 and 7i77 cards chosen, I am confused with encoder setup.
The 8i83 has no encoder terminals, so I'll connect those to the 7i95.
In the 7i95 tabs I guess I have to set say an X axis and can configure an encoder scale etc, but I also have to setup the 7i77 tab for another X axis for the analogue PID. (There is also an encoder tab in the 7i77 setup but don't understand why).
(Yes I know the 7i77 refs will need updating to 7i83 in due course)

But my question is how does anything know not to generate steps.
I cannot immediately see a way to disable the step gen and pid on the 7i95 as the config doesn't check out if I leave those fields blank.
Maybe, if there is an analogue channel set, step settings are just ignored?

I'd appreciate some clarification. Thanks
Thanks

Thanks.
I'll have to read the HAL reference some more to get a handle on how the syntax works as I haven't clicked with it and all the fields.
Cannot see any pins, so stumped by that.
There are net commands for example:-

net joint-0-index-enable <=> pid.x0.index-enable
net joint-0-index-enable <=> joint.0.index-enable

net joint-1-index-enable <=> pid.x1.index-enable
net joint-1-index-enable <=> joint.1.index-enable

joint 0 is X axis on the 7i95t and joint 1 is X axis on the 7i77

I don't know if that's wrong or right or makes any sense....
A lot more reading to do.