PathPilot with mesa 7i80 board

I’m trying to figure out how install a hostmot hm2_eth driver in pathpilot so I can talk to my hm2_7i80 card that controls a milling machine via Ethernet connection. After the 7i80 card is recognized I can work on the other issues that will show up.

I was trying to do this from a pathpilot install disk but I think I will need to work from source to do this to install the required mesa hm2_eth driver. I downloaded the available old source for pathpilot v1.8.2 and installed a clean version of Ubuntu 10.04-linuxcnc3 but so far the stock pathpilot source is not yet able to compile for me yet. I think I may have to install linuxcnc 2.5 first to satisfy dependencies from what I have read. Is that correct? I have read all three tuturials to help guide me along.

hi
what problem do you have with the pathpilot source ? ( email me )
you'll need to add the eth source and modify a few make files , as well as probably change from the rtai to uspace kernel changes , which will be the major headache .

the age of the pathpilot base code being based on ubuntu is the stumbling block , i would imagine
beware theirs a lot of code been removed from the pathpilot source compaired to lcnc .
as well as things such as redis and changes added .

My compile problem appears to be related to missing dependencies. The repository links that are on the computer that was configured with the Ubuntu (lucid) 10.04-linuxcnc3 cd are no longer valid and thus I cannot install the missing items. I have found some info on the internet that these links were changed to a archive of old versions Ubuntu lucid. That version is no longer supported and thus its use in my view is realty not desirable for new work.

I have been thinking about my goals and after some thought it turns out that I'm mainly interested in working on separating the pathpilot gui from pathpilot and interfacing it in a standard way to a current .dev version of linux cnc. This will be more useful for me and allow linuxcnc to be updated via git in a standard way for use or testing.

You can fix that by changing the Ubuntu repository settings, to old-releases.
www.mesaus.com/info/lucid-sources.txt

thats one of my goals , however pulling out the pathpilot GUI is the easy part ,
beware some of the changes are much deeper , pathpilot uses redis for communication for example
and there are changes such as the fanuc tools structure to the database

I got the gui pulled out so that I can start working on interfacing it to my configuration files and work on all the hidden issues that are bound to pop up. I have the gui running with latest version of linuxcnc-dev and use the run-in-place with uspace configuration to be able to access the mesa 7i80 board. Files used for capturing the gui were the 1.9.3 version and I did have to update psutil to a 64 bit version.

The operating system on the laptop I'm using runs on Linux Mint 2 "Betsy" - Cinnamon (64-bit) operating system with 3.18.13-rt10mah+ preempt kernel. Picture attached.

I have been working on verifying that the communication from the the gui to the redis server and linuxcnc-dev is working. To me it appears to be working fine with two links being established, one for cmd=hget and the other for cmd=client.

Pushing any buttons on the gui are being displayed in the terminal window that started linuxcnc-dev running. The log file that I attached shows what I believe to be a working communication link from the regis server to the gui via the local host link 127.0.0.1.. I have not yet figured out what needs to be done to be send and handle commands from the gui's simulated buttons to linuxcnc-dev or how send back data from linuxcnc-dev to the gui for display via the link. Any one have any hints on this? This link reminds me of shared global variables that are shared between computers via a Ethernet link.

Log-Notes attached.

do you have a git repro ?
i'm happy to help get this resolved

Not much of a help but that is some impressive work, well done. I want to do something similar even to the point of trying to connect the PathPilot GUI to something like the Gmoccapy or GScreen code bases. I hope you share how you did all this at some point, I would definitely be interested.

cncbasher: I decided not to use the old operating system and use the PathPilot restore disk for none machine owners instead as a guide. I will keep the link you provided in case I need it in the future.

I'm encouraged that it looks like this is going to be doable but its not a simple thing to do. I'm happy with the progress I have made to get the PathPilot gui working to "some" degree in a updated version of linuxcnc. Initially halshow did not show any of the PathPilot "signals" in its tree list but that appeared to get fixed by eliminating incompatibility issues with redis versions. Likely a conflict 32 bit version and my 64 bit version.

Issues that I had to be bypass for now and thus not worry about to much are related 4th axis homing, jog speeds, liststore, netbios and usb, with others likely lurking in the background. More code will likely need to be added to the build recipe of linuxcnc to fix these problems. So the use of the gui outside of PathPilot with all its functionality will require the build structure of linuxcnc to be modified before linuxcnc is compiled.

There are likely different ways to incorporate this gui into linuxcnc. The way I choose was to copy all required files into appropriate locations my linuxcnc-dev folder since this would likely be the way used if the PathPilot gui was ever distributed with linuxcnc. There are a few folders that are in the "home" folder for convenience. Right now these are folders, gcode, lathe_data, mil_data, tmc and updates. In the end some of these may not be needed or can be moved as desired.

To make the modifications required to a linuxcnc build when the PathPilot gui "is desired to be used" a script file will likely need to be generated to modify linuxcnc "configure" in the /linuxcnc/src folder and also move the gui files files to their desired locations automatically within the linuxcnc-dev folder. This will need a knowledgeable script writer volunteer.