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TL;DR: Can I wire these little TMC2226 (or similar) 3d printer stepper drivers to a 7i96?

Before you laugh I know it seems like a silly matchup. I've been out of the cnc game for a few years now but now I have some projects on mind some I'm trying to plan to reuse some old parts. I'm still fairly out of the loop on the advances made in linuxcnc and hardware since.

I want to build another one of these light weight "3d printed" cncs . By default these machines used arduino/grbl based controllers , but I enjoy linuxcnc so I fully intend on on using linuxcnc instead.

I have a NIB Mesa 7i96 that I never put into production .  I have some raspberry pi 4 Bs laying around from old projects. I would need to find new stepper drivers. These tiny stepper drivers are proven to work fine for these machines. I like the idea of cost and especially space savings with these little chips, and how the original design of the above linked machine integrates their electronics into the gantry. 

So can I just wire these TMC2226s into the 7i96 as a drop in replacement for something  like my old TB6600 s?

I don't quite understand yet if these little chips with all their pins, and uart mode, are a different animal than the old stepper drivers I used before.

PS. I'm excited to find out that there is an official release for the rpi. I've already flashed it and have been poking around in it.

daveansell2 wrote:

once I home the machine on the last joint to home (1) it stops being able to move in one direction on all axes. If I try and move it in the other direction it doesn't move. 
    

Can you try again explaining that as it does not make sense to me, or even better make a video and upload to youtube.

I am having a strange issue I have been running a CNC router with a dual motor axis for a while very happily and have just put in a second limit switch on the dual axis so it unracks itself on home in case it gets out of square, and have a really odd issue.Before I home the machine all the non-dual axes work fine (though it won't let me use the dual axis, which is annoying), once I home the machine on the last joint to home (1) it stops being able to move in one direction on all axes. If I try and move it in the other direction it doesn't move. 

I am attaching the previous version which uses a different config of limit switches, and seems to work fine - davemill-vfd.hal & davemill-vfd.ini
The new config is davemill-vfd-ind.hal & davemill-vfd-ind.hal

Does this make any sense to anyone?
   thanks
 
*** SOLVED *** see my post below

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i made an support request (issue) on git...

"Support for additional device ID (0xeb91) for XHC-WHB04B-6 clone (EDING CNC rebrand)"

Thanks for the report, this is fixed.

JT

We have already added at least one extra ID. Should be easy to add more.

github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/987

I would rather expect joint.N.motor-pos-cmd to re-init to the current encoder feedback value (joint.N.motor-pos-fb) on restart.
Maybe you have a missing HAL connection?
It's probably worth halscoping / halmetering those pins (and others) to see what is happening.

Of course, it means free

Bedava means free, right?

I am looking to buy a "firewall" PC with 4 ethernet ports to have one ethernet port for my mesa 7i76e one for ethercat and one for LAN.
Do you have recommendations for that currently I am looking at this system on amazon: amzn.to/4nEujde it has 4 x i226-V 2.5Gigabit Ethernet ports and seems to be fine for a linuxcnc build what do you think.

Or do you think I should rather get a normal big pc and get pci-express lan cards?
 

Hey,

I have Omron R88D-GN04H-ML2 drives in a three axes CNC pick and place setup. The drive takes the commands from Omron trajexia MC04/ML04 motion controller. I was hoping, I could control the servo drives from linuxcnc but found out about the mechatrolink-II network is the only available command interface to the drives. I would like to buy the FPGA hadware that you developed. May I contact you through personal email?

With this installation, I also tried the touch plate function. It’s visible that after probing the touch plate, the program sets the Z value to the height of the touch plate before executing the retract. This causes the retract value to be added, and the resulting height above the object is correct.
Unfortunately, the program then subtracts the length of the current tool, which in my case is not useful.
Is it possible to disable this behavior?

Thank you very much for your support.
Best regards,
Klaus

After experiencing issues with other software on my computer, I decided to perform a fresh installation using the current DVD version 2.9.4. (2.9.7 after Upgrade)

Unfortunately, I'm once again encountering problems with Z-Level Compensation.
After creating the “probe_points.txt” file, I can enable “Z-Comp”, but the value in the “Z_Axis Comp” field does not change as expected. Once “Z_COMP” is turned off, it cannot be reactivated without restarting the program.
Do you have any idea what might be causing this?

Thank you very much for your support.
Best regards,
Klaus

What I noticed right away was that they use SyncManager 0 for process data. This is not normal.
SyncManagers 2 and above are for process data, SM 0 and 1 are for mailboxes and handles SDO upload/download especially during the early phases like INIT.
I don't think you can change the syncmanagers, the device has what it has, but a wild experiment could be to change the SyncManager idx="0" to idx="3". If you haven't thrown the device in the bin already