Mesa 7i96 Ethernet board

Hi guys!

First of all i'm from Poland and also newbie on this forum, however using linuxcnc for quite long time.
Recently i bought 7i96 card and planning to play around with it first. (only LPT experience before).
From what i understood 7i96 doesn't fully supported yet by linuxcnc so hopefully this thread will grow and be useful for other 7i96 users.
From myself can't bring much to community as a developer, but have some hardware which can be used for testing linuxcnc and 7i96.
That's enough for intro , time for questions.

From what i get here my first steps should be installing Debian 7 with preempt kernel and manual for that is quite clear so planning to play with that soon.
Is there anything else i can do with my 7i96 and installed as above linuxcnc at this moment? Was looking for other threads about this card and not much found.

Once you have linuxCNC installed, you can quickly try connecting to the card from the command line. (I don't know if this will work, but it probably will)

If that all works then will show your HAL pins

This might, or might not, work. I can't find "7i96" anywhere in the source code, so it's probably best to stop guessing what happens next at this point. I could easily imagine the card appearing as a 7i90 or similar.

Thank you!
debian installed - no trouble, instruction is very clear and nice.
card is talking, however it says unrecognized
have to wait until smart guys implement it.

It should still work (I have a 7I96 working here with linuxcnc)
The only thing that will not work yet are the 6 isolated outputs

PCW,
is there any trick?
i don't have 7i96 on the list in PNCconf

Probably the easiest thing to do to make a hal for a simple step/dir system and edit it by hand
for example you could use pncconf and choose a 5i25/probrxf2 config, set up the step timing and whatnot and the edit the resulting
hal file by
1. Globally changing "5i25" to "7i96"
2. Changing the

loadrt hm2_pci line to

loadrt hm2_eth board_ip=10.10.10.10

ok, that's the clue, thank you.
will try that in next free time slot
finishing machine now so any free time is eaten by that

Zacharius wrote: card is talking, however it says unrecognized

That is just a warning that the port names in the listing that follows will be wrong.

(The ?? in the pin list would normally say P2 or P3 or similar).

I just ordered a 7i96 and THCAD from mesa before reading this. Do you any idea when the 6 isolated outputs problem be corrected or should I send it back and get the 7i76e? I'd love to fix it myself but just don't know this stuff well enough. I'm building a CNC Plasma table and should be ready for the control part in about 2 weeks. Thanks!

PCW wrote: The only thing that will not work yet are the 6 isolated outputs

Can you explain why they won't work? Are they not smart-serial interfaced?