Billy Boy wrote:

Is the rPi GPIO interface considered fully baked, or is the Mesa 7i96S the smart bet? I would totally love to avoid the $150+ for the Mesa, but only if that does not then cost me an additional $300 in labor time.

 

It depends on what you need. I don't think that the GPIO interface on the Pi is quite as good as a parallel port, and the parallel port is only supported out of habit and as a way to get new users started cheaply. 

You will get more speed out of steppers with a Mesa card, and this is not solely down to step rate. It comes down to the resolution of the increments in step rate as the system accelerates.  If the Pi can do 20kHz flat-out then the slower rates are quantised at 10Khz, 6,66kHz, 5kHz... The motor can't physically follow such large speed steps. The Mesa card can do 20kHz, but also 19.99999 kHz too. And 20.00001

But, you could start with the GPIO and see if it's acceptable for the application. 
 

tommylight wrote:

In short:
RPI can do at most 20000 steps per second, if lucky and with a bit of fiddling (this is from what i read here, i stopped using RPI since version 3B)

The 3B wasn't very useful for LinuxCNC. The Pi4 worked a lot better (and can be used with Ethernet Mesa hardware). The Pi5 is better again. 

The reason I suggested the Pi5 in this context is that if anything goes wrong with the Pi you can just slot in an identical Pi with the _same_ SD card and be back to exactly where you were. 
If using PCs it can be difficult to find an exact replacement. Yes a _similar_ PC might work, and might run properly with the old SSD. But it might not. 

I fixed the missing 7i76eu from the stepper boards variable which caused a partial build of the main.hal file and leaving out the enable and the stepper setp lines.

JT

Can you attach your ini file?

Did you skip Drive 0 and Drive 1?

JT

Here is a video i did some 5 years ago, i tested the included rack toolchanger on a machine and it just worked after editing out the sim stuff:

You can try the same thing, namely, make the sim work on another config for parallel port (no need for a machine) and after getting this to work add the required entries from it to your machine config while also editing the tool positions.

Flex GUI is built using the python interface

gnipsel.com/linuxcnc/flexgui/index.html

JT

2 Y191
Pretty sure that is wrong....