PathPilot Tormach Clone Setup

robertspark wrote: thanks very much
(sorry I got the 7i92 (not 96!!!))... too many similar numbers...

fingers crossed it should all arrive over the Christmas period (I use a forwarding agent from the us to UK as the shipping from tormach and Mesa was eyewatering..... to be fair I actually bought it from mesaus... who do have very sensible and reasonable international shipping costs)

You can get them from Portugal eusurplus.com/

I thought the cost was a little high from there including shipping and Portuguese VAT (23%)

I know where I stand with buying from the US suppliers (I've bought from mesaus before)

7I92H 95.97€
DHL Shipping to UK 22.10€ (only option)
Shipping insurance 12.00€
EU VAT (23%) 29.92€
Total 159.99€
total cost to door £144.80

MesaUS
7192H $89.00
first class shipping $19.50 (option for ups too 61.15... not needed for me)
$ 108.50 >> £80.42
+ 20 % VAT £16.08
total cost to door £96.50

That's not too bad..

I paid a bit less but waited a little longer..I think mine came from eusurplus.com...but i really can't remember.....

It's worth doing a bit of research while you wait, get pathpilot installed and boot to desktop,....if you don't do the keyboard thing it will try to start pathpilot with no ethernet connection to the mesa card and quit.

I made a custom bitfile for my card and told pathpilot to load it at startup, just because i wanted to cover as many options as poss..but it's not required.

you will need to modify the HAL file though because it uses a period measurement to determine if the chuck guard is open or if a limit switch has been triggered.

for my lathe i by-passed this part and connected (netted?) the signals directly to the tags...it will make more sense as you learn how it all bolts together.........

read about ini and hal these files are bread and butter.....

above all.....have fun.

I adapted the signals between the 7i92 and my BOB (an old PMDX-132) using a ribbon cable, and a pin header with jumper wires. Not pretty but it works.

When you get to the Linux screen, find the Startup Apps widget and disable PAthpilot and be sure to enable Mate-panel. From then on you start PP from a terminal with ./operator-login command.

And if you Update pathpilot, your old files will still be on the disk under its verion number.

let the fun begin.... hardware + software finally arrived ...

your main objective is to remap signals and remove the dependancy on the freq2pin for the limit switches, 1800hz is door , 2000 hz is limit you basically have to tell PP your hardware is doing that

the next major item is remaping the spindle. PP is setup for Freq Control of a spindle using the stepgen. if you use this all you have to do is play with ini settings to tune it. otherwise you have to remap things to the way yours works.

look for the nets PP uses mostly defined the post gui hal file

the rest as was mentioned is mapping your hardware the same as pp and changing your XZ sizes scaling etc...

Sandra