I hate the 7i97T

the whole connection thing was already working on mesaflash and mesact, i could confirm with mesact, every test was a success. But Linuxcnc would fail, In the end I had to click on the network button top right and then it worked.

As for now i´m okay. Sorry for the rant, but I was used to it being easy setup with Pncconfigwizardo

PCW wrote:

You need to configure the network on the host for the Mesa card.

Also 192.168.1.121 is not suggested for LinuxCNC use as it's  in
a commonly used NAT range.

Suggested setup is to use the 10.10.10.10 address on the Mesa card
(via the IP address setup jumpers) and set  a static host address of
say 10.10.10.100/24.

At this point you should be able to ping the Mesa card:

ping 10.10.10.10


 

I found the problem I had the whole time but Linux didn´t point it out enough for me. Since the 7i97t is connected via ethernet i ran into more and more problems when I approached wiring up the machine and testing in and outputs. Today i started wiring the Lathe to the Mesacard and i didn´t get any MPG Handwheel feedback at all, a few seconds into starting Linuxcnc I´d run into queueing errors.
Little research pointed me to major network problems, causing the 7i97t to indicate a fault with CR7 red whenever i try to connect and hold connection.

I turned the checkbox "show notifications" in the network tab top right on and viola i got an error "disconnected". So i went with your suggestion and set the Jumpe on the card to eeprom default ip=10.10.10.10
still the same problem. For sure i changed my own IP to 10.10.10.100. Still the same. I changed the cable. Still the same. I tried a lot of thernet configurations.

In the end, the fix was: The subnet mask was set to "24" and not to "255.255.255.0". After fixing that the card connected right away and the network symbol stopped spinning. Since I´m not familiar with Linux, that spinning symbol gave me bad feelings but there is no Tooltip showing up, telling me what that icon actually means.

Now got already both MPG wheels hooked up. Somehow I cna´t find the TB5 IN8 pin in Halshow...

Input 8  (TB5 pin 1)  is

hm2_7i97.0.inmux.00.input-08
 

This may be obvious to everyone, but just in case: there are two different ways of specifying subnet masks. You can either spell out the mask itself, in either hex or decimal( ff.ff.ff.00 or 255.255.255.0), or you can simply specify the number of 1 bits in the mask: 24. If the mask itself is given, it should always be written as 4 dot-separated octets. If the count is given, it's usually specified with a / character, after the network itself, as in 10.10.10.0/24. (Aside: note that using the count-of-bits method, you can never specify a subnet mask that isn't a contiguous set of 1 bits. Such "non-contiguous" masks are technically legal, but are really hard to manage, so, don't do that.

Sometimes though the subnet mask does become important. I was allocated a 64 IP address range from my ISP way back when it was a dedicated dial up connection. Then the mask was important /26 or 255.255.255.192. But when setting up your own networks, just using 255 IP address are plenty and if you need seperate subnets, use the 192.168,  172.16 and 10 ranges or you can use 192.168.1.x, 192.168.2.x etc. You might need 2 seperate networks if you have a router with 2 WAN ports so you can have a failover connection or DMZ.