I've been using emc/linuxcnc for upwards of 20
years, but up till now I've been using stepconf to
do the setup. With parallel ports becoming a
pain, I decided to try a mesa card.
I'm using the image from LinuxCNC 2.8.0 Raspberry
Pi OS based on Debian 10 Buster
linuxcnc-2.8.0-pi4.zip
Wrote it to a sdcard and boots with no problems.
I bought a 7c80 and am finding that documentation
for install and configure is scarce and obscure.
I made a short ribbon cable which seems to work
properly.
sudo mesaflash --spi --device 7c80 --addr
/dev/spidev0.0 --readhmid
Works although if I have loaded hostmot2, I have
to shutdown and restart since the pi is powered
from the 7c80.
Ran mesaflash with 7c80d.bit It appears to have
worked properly.
The board responds to hostmot2.
halcmd loadrt hostmot2
halcmd loadrt hm2_rpspi
prints a plausible response from 7c80
Question 1. I plan to hook stepper drivers
directly to the 7c80. Is this the correct bitfile
for the job?
I created a .hal and .ini file with pnCConf choosing 7i76e.
I then changed all instances of 7i76e to 7c80 and
hm2_ether to hm2_rpspi in the hal file. hm2_spi
did not work.
Sort of works. Linuxcnc will start up but throws
a lot of errors. Will not run the standard logo file.
hm2/hm2_7c80.0: hm2_read_pin_descriptors: invalid port width 27
The only reference to this error I found was for
the 7c81 with an error for 19 pins and the
solution seemed to be to modify hostmot2 to allow
19 pins.
Since others seem to be running the 7c80
successfully, this doesn't sound like the good
solution.
Question 2. How do I cope with this error?
Question3. Is there someone who would share
copies of hal and ini files for a xyz(a) stepper
machine using rpi4 and 7c80. If there are any
posted on line I haven't found them yet.
Thanks in advance,
Jim Hurlburt
Bend, OR
