OK, I'm lost... completely. Mesa 7i92

Hi all
I'm building my first lathe! I have been machining for over 30 years but I am not an electronics whiz nor am I a programmer or hacker in the sense that most Linux people would think or would be thought of. I do have enough basic electronics to have built my own driver and BOB from kits, and I built my own function generator, not saying much but there it is. I do actualy have the machine together and have fired up everything and it appears ready. I know CNC extensively, but building a machine is far different than programming, setting up, or operating one.

I bought a computer specifically for this project (a laptop) and built several kernels, testing, in order to get latency where I wanted it.
I bought a nice 7i92 Ethernet card to skip the parallel port because I thought it would be faster and easer to deal with. This is where I have run into a problem.

I have searched and searched and found lots and lots of great, detailed information about my card (in the manual), about hostmot2 (in the man pages), about HM2_ETH (in the linuxcnc.org docs). But I can find nothing about how all this fits together, I cannot even figure out how to USE mesa flash. Is there nothing that says : if you have this mesa card START here and END here? you know, do this, then this, then this....and so on? Something like ...a manual? I need to understand how to make the computer and the mesa card, and the mesa card and my breakout board all work together. Any Idea as to where I might find that information? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jim

Linuxcnc support for the 7I92 (and all Mesa Ethernet FPGA cards) is very new so
unfortunately you are on the bleeding edge here...

Whats required:

1. A linux system with a Preempt-RT kernel running
2. A uspace version of Linuxcnc 2.7 or 2.8 (this and a Preempt-RT kernel can be installed as a package for Debian Wheezy)
If you are using a different flavor of linux (like Ubuntu 14.04 or Mint 17.1) you must compile linuxcnc (and likely the Preempt-RT kernel)
from source
3. A free Ethernet port, preferably set up to IP address 10.10.10.1 (detailed setup info is in the hm2-eth man page)
4. A Mesa Ethernet FPGA card set to address 10.10.10.10 (EEPROM IP address = 7I92 W5 DOWN W6 UP)
5. A HAL configuration that suits your hardware. ( freeby.mesanet.com/7i92step.zip is a simple example )

Note some laptops work well with Preempt-RT (My dell E6420 works fine with a 7I92)
E6420 latency:
freeby.mesanet.com/e6420.png

Screenshot of LinuxCNC running on E6420 laptop:
freeby.mesanet.com/linuxcnc.png

But you cannot change power modes (battery to line or line to battery) without dreadful things happening to latency

To get Mesaflash to work you first need to setup your Ethernet port as explained above
so you can at least ping the 7I92. ( that is, ping 10.10.10.10 works)
Note that running mesaflash with no command will cause it to print brief usage instructions

7I92 support in mesaflash is very new so you may need to download the latest mesaflash source from

github.com/micges/mesaflash

Then for example to print out the current 7I92 configurations pinout a command like

mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 10.10.10.10 --readhmid

will print this information

(I DO NOT suggest re- writing the 7I92 configuration with mesaflash
until you know EXACTLY what you wish to accomplish and how )

BTW if you are running a 7I92 from a laptop its handy to power the 7I92 with a "USB power thief" cable
(Just a cut USB cable with the signal lines unused)

After 4 years, I am thinking about picking up this unfinished project again. Anything new in the Mesa 7i92 area? Has anyone actually used this card yet?

Hi
im using this all over
from lathe to 6 axis

English?

Note that the 7I92 is much better supported now than in 2015
The easiest way to get a working LinuxCNC setup for the 7I92 is to
download the LinuxCNC/Stretch test ISO:

www.linuxcnc.org/testing-stretch-rtpreempt/