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Having mostly put the machine together and found ModbusTCP unsuitable, I took another attempt at Ethercat.

1. I installed LinuxCNC 2.9.4 from the ISO on the nearest available beige box (which has a Realtek ethernet card)
2. I installed the r8168-dkms driver
3. I built ethercat from source to exclude EoE as follows:
   1. git clone gitlab.com/etherlab.org/ethercat.git ethercat-master
   2. cd ethercat-master/
   3. git checkout stable-1.6
   4. ./bootstrap (I didn't have autoconf or libtool installed: they are necessary)
   5. ./configure --sysconfdir=/etc/ --disable-8139too --enable-userlib --enable-generic --disable-eoe
   6. make all modules
   7. sudo su
   8. make modules_install install
   9. depmod
   10. exit
   11. sudo nano /etc/ethercat.conf
   12. sudo systemctl enable ethercat.service
   13. sudo systemctl start ethercat.service
   14. sudo systemctl status ethercat.service
   15. sudo chmod 666 /dev/EtherCAT0
   16. sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/99-ethercat.rules
   17. sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
4. I installed linuxcnc-ethercat from the repository
5. I installed the CIA402 module:
   1. git clone github.com/dbraun1981/hal-cia402
   2. sudo halcompile --install cia402.comp

And it works very nicely most of the time. See attached ethercat xml file.

I see some "PLL error" failures sometimes, which can only be "solved" by restarting the control process. I've tried adjusting refClockSyncCycles and sync0Shift in accordance with some other threads, but I don't understand what those do or what they should actually be.

The AC servo drives won't work because the wiring currently is only halfway complete, and I want to have the system documented in the intended state before I power anything.

There's no config loaded on to the Mesa cards yet (or a config between the Mesa cards and LinuxCNC), so after talking to my friend who kicked the project off, I've decided to take a slightly different approach, which is I'm going to set up and configure the EStop switch for LinuxCNC first, so I can verify that each of my components work. I will: Document the wiring, wire the switch, confirm the connections, verify the Mesa card functions, establish the appropriate configuration in LinuxCNC for the EStop switch, and use Halscan to verify it works. Once I've confirmed I can get a functional switch in LinuxCNC, I can start taking on something the servo wiring problems. 

That way I'll know the base of the software / hardware stack works well, and I can proceed confidently with wiring the servo drives. It also hopefully gives me a chance to do more research on if my wiring setup will work / get some feedback on my proposed plan of Analog +10v control with the encoder wiring as documented above. Once my documentation is a little more cleaned up, I'll share that too.

Edit: Oh, and I appreciate the advice to focus on what's in use, but I like to see things in the context they exist in, it's helpful for me to conceptualize the whole system - I've already roughly documented all of the existing connections and what they're used for, so it's mostly about trying to figure out how the systems fit together and deciding on the pattern that I want to wire things in to make it so it's easy for me to understand it if I have to work on it in the future.  

Mesa, Pico, Parallel port and EtherCAT are safe.

It's the other stuff I am really interested in. Can we safely sunset those drivers?

wiring issue causing a short?

I did not encounter any bugs, but than againe i used it for 15min or so and did not run a programm, ohnly joged it a bit and tryed the simple to test stuff
But that is definetly an opinion strenagsening me in the get rid of it all thinking.

Yes, I saw it.

But with 3 axes it works. That's why I'm asking.

I haven't used Mach3 for more than 10 years (it's an obsolete buggy system), but I thought it was not great / had issues with lathes?

I think the tricky part  with feed override and spindle speed override
is to get along with the GUI

yes, I knew about the 7i96s, yes, I had connected two independent ones when I had a lathe that worked in sync... here I will find an example for one via the axix selector,as a pendant I think it's not a problem. My problem is that I don't know how to connect potentiometers in the hall (if the first three inputs in mode 3 are analog on the 7i77?) how can they recognize it in the hall as spindle override and feed override?

hm2_eth: ERROR: Could not retrieve hardware address (MAC) of 192.168.1.121: Resource temporarily unavailable

Means that there is no communication with the 7I96S

If you search the forum for "MPG" you will find a number of examples

The 7I77 has 2 MPG inputs (4 pins) and the 7I96S has 4 MPG inputs (8 pins)
Either will work wit 5V to 24V signals

Yeah, I was amused to discover the same!

Thanks for the link - I was hoping he'd have some wiring guidance, but he never ended up getting the mill.

What I really need to proceed is to be confident that I'm not going to blow something up by wiring the Mesa board to the servo in the described fashion - it appears from reading the manual that it's fine to wire it as "Analog Circuit D", on Page 18 to the Mesa driver pins, and I'm assuming that I can then also wire up the JP5 Encoder output to the Mesa Encoder pins as a "Line Drive / Reciever" as on page 20. Once that's done, it feels like I could set up a basic LinuxCNC HAL / INI / PnCconf setup to power and move the servos.

Manual link here for ease of reference:
www.dmm-tech.com/_files/ugd/ac1ef8_924ca...fce9d.pdf?index=true

I can also call my friend who has his setup and get him to walk me through his setup and emulate that, but I like to know how the system actually works vs just emulating other people's configurations

So the plasma_gcode_preprocessor which comes with Monokrom works for you? I still had no success.

Hi guys!

 I managed to stop my LinuxCNC from giving errors by isolating a core of my CPU. Since then, the milling operations have not stopped and everything is going well.Now I need to add a 2-axis rotary table.

I copied my working configuration from my Mesa 7i96s, and added two A/B axes, both in the INI and in the HAL.I thought it would be as simple as that, but I'm getting an error.I'm not sure if the axes should be called A/B in the configuration.I'm attaching the files to see if you can help me.

Thank you. 

2.9.0. I didn't have a 7i92 with me, so I used a 7i96s as the main card, which turned out to be better because I'm planning two additional axes later that will use steppers...now about mpg, maybe and I have an example to try...but I didn't have any experience with connecting potentiometers for feed and spindle override, and any Hal example would be valuable to me.