Table of Contents

1 Pico PPMC

Pico Systems has a family of boards for doing servo, stepper, and pwm control. The boards connect to the PC through a parallel port working in EPP mode. Although most users connect one board to a parallel port, in theory any mix of up to 8 or 16 boards can be used on a single parport. One driver serves all types of boards. The final mix of I/O depends on the connected board(s). The driver doesn't distinguish between boards, it simply numbers I/O channels (encoders, etc) starting from 0 on the first card.

Installing:

loadrt hal_ppmc port_addr=<addr1>[,<addr2>[,<addr3>...]]

The port_addr parameter tells the driver what parallel port(s) to check. By default, <addr1> is 0x0378, and <addr2> and following are not used. The driver searches the entire address space of the enhanced parallel port(s) at port_addr, looking for any board(s) in the PPMC family. It then exports HAL pins for whatever it finds. During loading (or attempted loading) the driver prints some usefull debugging message to the kernel log, which can be viewed with dmesg.

Up to 3 parport busses may be used, and each bus may have up to 8 devices on it.

1.0.1 Pins

In the following pins, parameters, and functions, <board> is the board ID. According to the naming conventions the first board should always have an ID of zero. However this driver sets the ID based on a pair of jumpers on the baord, so it may be non-zero even if there is only one board.

1.0.2 Parameters

1.0.3 Functions