Pulling out my hair trying to set up a spindle on 7i96

Hey, everyone.I'm doing a linuxcnc conversion on a ShopSabre 23 machine. Just got a 7i96 board in the mail and have been setting it up on my desk. It's been good so far, got the relays and endstops working. Unfortunately the spindle is giving me some trouble. We have an 18k rpm spindle driven by Mitsubishi A800 VFD which accepts 5-10 analog speed control.

I was under the impression that I would be able to convert PWM into analog voltage with this card and that's how I set it up in the Pncconf 18000 rpm at 5v, but the rpm readout in qtdragon only goes up to 500 for some reason. The spindle setup looks like another stepper config and I'm confused about the scale. I've read pretty much every spindle related post here which lead me to more confusion since everybody has different hardware.I haven't flashed any firmware on the card, just working with the stock one that it came with.I have a PWM to analog converter board

Here is the VFD manual   you can find the speed control on page 115

Can somebody please steer me into the right direction?I will include my ini an hal files just in case.

You need the 7i96S for spindle control.

You may have purchased the wrong one by mistake. I almost did that!

You would need to use firmware that has a PWM output to drive
your PWM to analog circuit, like 7i96d_1pwm.bit.

This firmware replaces stepgen4 STEP and DIR with PWM 0
PWM/DIR

To use pncconf to set up the spindle PWM, you would also need to use
the discover option (so pncconf knows there's a PWMGEN available)


 

Yeah, I wanted the S version, but they were out of stock, so I jumped on what was available. I’ve been trying to get ahold of a Mesa card for a while, but with the chip shortage everything was out of stock. I’ve seen people driving analog spindles with the PWM output from the 4th motor driver through a converter, it’s definitely doable. I’m just not too sure about the software side of things.

Aaahhh thank you. I got a bit nervous after opening the firmware folder and seeing so many different versions. I will try as soon as I get to work Monday and report back.
Thanks again

i dont know if this is a bug in pncconf or with my setup, but i had the same problem as you. I connected the enable spindle on tb3 13 and 14 and configured in pncconf the pins out0- and out0+ as the enable spindle. didnt work at all. the moment i connected them with out1- and out1+ (TB3 15 and 16) but kept the configuration in pncconf to out0- and out0+ it worked. I expect there is a mismatch in pncconf between the numbering of the outputs and the pin layout of the mesa 7i96s. Not sure why but it worked toi enable the spindle (though no speedcontrol yet)

pncconf (at least in 2.9.4) does seem to do the right thing.

SSR 00 for Spindle CW and SSR 01 for Spindle CCW:
( they are in odd locations on the screen)


  


This does generate the expected connections in the hal file: