Hardware Pulse Generation Questions

So, my questions are.

1.) Is the combination of a Mesa 5i25+7i76 to LinuxCNC, what the Smoothstepper is to Mach3?

2.) Is motherboard selection as high of a priority when using the Mesa products?


Thanks in advance.

Disregard above questions, I read the manuals during lunch. It would seem the 5i25 is a fancy GPIO card and the 7i76 is a fancy BOB that can connect to the 5i25. No increased stepper rate provided. Would enable very clean interface to all required hardware though.

So the new questions are:

Does anybody have any experience using the 5i25+7i76?

Do they play well together?

Do they play well with LinuxCNC?

Thanks in advance.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MeAgain

Disregard above questions, I read the manuals during lunch. It would seem the 5i25 is a fancy GPIO card and the 7i76 is a fancy BOB that can connect to the 5i25. No increased stepper rate provided. Would enable very clean interface to all required hardware though.

So the new questions are:

Does anybody have any experience using the 5i25+7i76?

Do they play well together?

Do they play well with LinuxCNC?

Thanks in advance.

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The 5I25 is more than a fancy GPIO card (though it can do GPIO)
It can do hardware step generation (to ~8MHz step rates), MHz encoder counting in hardware including velocity estimation, serial interfaces, PWM generation and much more.

The 5I25 and 7I76 are fully supported by LinuxCNC (including the isolated I/O, hardware step generation, spindle control and encoder feedback)

PCW_MESA - Thank you for your response.

So then, it would appear that the LinuxCNC+5i25+7i76 is superior to Mach3+Smoothstepper.

This was my original thought and what I think after rereading the manuals at home in peace and quiet.

Can you point me to a thread, on this or some other forum were I could read about how these were integrated into a system?

I would be interested in the kind of performance that was realised by the system.

Would really like to see some video of a CNC Router under the control of LinuxCNC+5i25+7i76.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MeAgain

PCW_MESA - Thank you for your response.

So then, it would appear that the LinuxCNC+5i25+7i76 is superior to Mach3+Smoothstepper.

This was my original thought and what I think after rereading the manuals at home in peace and quiet.

Can you point me to a thread, on this or some other forum were I could read about how these were integrated into a system?

I would be interested in the kind of performance that was realised by the system.

Would really like to see some video of a CNC Router under the control of LinuxCNC+5i25+7i76.

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The 5I25 and 7I76 are fairly new so I don't know off hand of a router config using that card pair but all of our cards work the same under LinuxCNC so there will not be any significant performance difference between these and older cards.

Here for example is a step/dir servo driven Plasma/Router machine using our hardware (an older card called a 7I43):

LinuxCNC Documentation Wiki: GantryPlasmaMachine

Note that there is now a GUI configuration program (pncconf) to simplify setting up the HAL an INI files

I would also look through the LinuxCNC forum (am I allowed to say that here?)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PCW_MESA

The 5I25 and 7I76 are fairly new so I don't know off hand of a router config using that card pair but all of our cards work the same under LinuxCNC so there will not be any significant performance difference between these and older cards.

Here for example is a step/dir servo driven Plasma/Router machine using our hardware (an older card called a 7I43):

LinuxCNC Documentation Wiki: GantryPlasmaMachine

Note that there is now a GUI configuration program (pncconf) to simplify setting up the HAL an INI files

I would also look through the LinuxCNC forum (am I allowed to say that here?)

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I will check them out for sure. This looks like an excellent package.

Thank You

PCW_MESA

I read through the awesome link you provided. Very informative and detailed.

Now to switch gears from Mach3 to LinuxCNC.

Fortunately I enjoy reading.

Must have plowed through all the Mach3 documentation at least a half dozen times adding to and refining my notes each time.

I do wish I had discovered the LinuxCNC+Mesa 5I25+7i76 package 6 months ago. This just looks so clean and compact and feature rich.

Off to learn LinuxCNC.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Hi
Look here，Linuxcnc with realtime Ethernet controller，It looks good。
https://youtu.be/MxNOWiiTsdI