M.E.S.S.I Board

I am getting ready to do some more bench testing / filming out in the shed with my new M.E.S.S.I Board and thought others may find it interesting.

What is a M.E.S.S.I Board? It is a ” Mesa Electronics Smart Serial Interface ” Board. It provides us with a means to connect a Mesa Smart Serial board to the 7I92. Not only that; it can also be used to add more Smart Serial connections to boards that already have one when you may need a second as long as you have two free fpga pins. It is 3.3v / 5v tolerant and can be powered by either while sending 5v up to 1.5a to down stream Smart Serial boards. RJ45 led indicators are used for showing when a smart serial board is properly connected ( yellow ) and when the board is communicating with LinuxCNC ( flashing green )

Not sure, it was just something I needed in house. If there was enough interest I could definitely look into making a batch or putting together a data package with schematics, gerbers, B.O.M ect. so any one could make their own.

Interested.
Also what is the brand name of the terminal blocks?

The terminal block used on this revision is made by Phoenix Contact P/N 1771062.

A quick video testing the board with my 7i92 and 7i73 so far so good, testing went well.

Back on this while I wait for parts to arrive for my Taig mill encoder build. I have setup a new Github page " here ". I will try to post any relevant designs / code there. Currently I am redoing the board in KiCad V7 in preparation for posting the files, I thought it best to better organize and clean up my work before publishing. 



While I am at it the thought of adding ESD protection crossed my mind. Would this be desired or needed?

Probably gonna want to keep those boards pretty close to the controller since it's single ended in the controller side. I assume those are a differential transmitter and receiver on the RJ45 side

Correct on both accounts, I plan on placing my m.e.s.s.i board directly next to the Mesa 7i92 that provides the RX/TX lines. The differential lines will be connected to my Mesa 7i73 outside of the main electrical enclosure on the other end of a 15-20ft cable bundle near the monitor.

I am using the 7i73 for physical button, lcd dro and encoder inputs. Currently no noise / communication problems during bench testing, however everything is mounted to the same structure with very short cable runs. I also want to keep the m.e.s.s.i board pretty universal for a variety of use cases outside of just the 7i73 so anyone can make and use one to add a smart serial connection.