Choosing the right Mesa Boards?

Hey Everyone,

I am trying to figure out how to choose the right Mesa boards for my application, as there seems to be a daunting amount of options with little to no difference between some... My servo Drives say they are digital but I don't really know what the defining difference is and what that means for my boards.

I was planning to use Mach and CSMIO Motion control (which I've already purchased, but deiced to abandon that for LINUX AND MESA.

SERVOS:
The servo Drives I am Using are these : www.aliexpress.com/item/Economic-Servo-D...NK0/32917361467.html
The manual can be found here: www.xsimulator.net/community/attachments...ser-manual-pdf.9013/

VFD;
Baldor H2 Vector Drive Cat # 85009973
I believe this to be the manual: drivecentre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/0...op-Series-Manual.pdf

Obviously I will also need some I/O as well

Dose Mesa have an actual motion control board or is that taken care of by the PC/Software?

I appreciate any help here!

This is the machine when I got it:

Current State:

Those look to be step/dir controlled drives so you can have a choice of Mesa :
5i25 or 6i25 with a 7i76
7i76E
7i92 with a 7i76
or the cheapest version
7i96

So Tommy, is the actual motion control itself all being done software through Linux and these boards are literally just termination points for interfacing?

So after looking at these if I understand right the 7i76 is the board that all the drives an I/O terminate to and the 6i25 is what is used to interface the PC to the Breakout Boards. The 7i92 would be similar to the 6i25 but would be ethernet based rather than pci?

Sorry for the basic questions just trying to get a grasp

Sorry more questions here, so dose the 7176E eliminate the need for the 5i25 or 6i25? or is it just the Ethernet version and would be used in conjunction with the 7i92?

Yes, a 7I76E (or 7I96) is a combined FPGA/controller card and breakout

The 7I92 is just the FPGA/controller part and needs a Mesa or parallel port compatible breakout board if not used with a integrated drive/Breakout like a Gecko G540 or Leadshine MX3660/4660

You got that right to the point that 5i25/6i25/7i92 are hardware step generators and other required IO stuff alone or through 7i76.
7i76E and 7i96 are a complete board with everything in it, of course the 7i76E has more IO.
Since your drives output encoder signals, you could also use one of those boards with another board (7i85 i think but not sure, so better check ) for encoder feedback. That way you can have full control of the machine with the servo loop also closed in Linuxcnc. That would be best the case.

Thanks Tommy!

I would definitely like to go closed loop on the Linuxcnc side. Is there any advantage to say using 6i25 with a 7i76 over just using a 7i76E?

Type_Zero_Design wrote: Thanks Tommy!

I would definitely like to go closed loop on the Linuxcnc side. Is there any advantage to say using 6i25 with a 7i76 over just using a 7i76E?

Not that i noticed, ever. I only had one of each system and they are still working, never had a single issue with them.
I do have a lot of 5i25 and 6i25 and 7i92, several 7i77 and a lot more mesa boards, just here on this table in my bedroom i have a 6i25/7i77/THCAD wired and powered doing some configs for cnc Plasma cutters with THC, another 5i25 and a 7i92 and a 7i73 not wired waiting their turn.
Went off a bit there.....

They each have their advantages
The Ethernet cards have an advantage of isolation and wire distance. The pci and pcie have a theoretical speed advantage if you should need to run a faster than normal servo thread and are slightly simpler to configure. But for most machines the differences should not matter.

So it seems like if I were going to use a 7i85 for encoder feedback it would make the most sense to to go with a 7i92 rather than 7i76E beacuse the 7i92 supports two break out boards so if I understand correctly the 7i76E would still require a 7192, 5i25 or 6i25 to run the 7i85?

If thats so would a good option be 7i92 with 7i76 and 7i85?

I apologize for all the questions just want to make sure I do this right.