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I have just received a mesa 5I25 with a mesa 7i76 bob I had ordered to drive my stepper foam cutter.

The host2mot doc does not seem to cover this hardware. Can someone with a similar setup point me in the right direction as far as configuring hal ?

I eventually want to drive stepper motors trough the 7I76, but for the moment, I would just connect my current setup directly to the db25 cable coming out of the 5i25.

Regards

JBlain

jblain wrote:
If the firmware on the board is for the 7i76 then you would need to change the firmware to use it like a parallel port. (the "wasted" GND pins have a function in the 7i76 configuration, and none of the pins actually carry conventional bit-level signals).

You can change the firmware, there is a utility in the "support software" pack for the 5i25 that you can download from Mesa. Note that the file is Zipped, so the Linux utility loses it's executable tag, and you will need to chmod 775 it to get it to work.

This thread describes how to make pncconf work with the 7i76.
www.linuxcnc.org/index.php/english/compo...=14940&limit=6#14940

The prob_rfx2 and g540x2 5I25/6I25 configurations have parallel port compatible pinouts. This only really matters if you want to use them with BOB/daughter card designed for use with a standard parallel port. That is, if you use the bare DB25 pins one th 5I25, a 7I76x2 config will work for driving step motors and the encoder input should work as well (though the sserial pins could only be used as GPIO)

The four "wasted" ground pins are either used as ground (for parallel port compatible BOBs)
or used as a 5V source for Mesa daughter cards (this is a 5I25 jumper option)