New to the CNC Zone and performing my first CNC build. I’m having some trouble and nothing I’ve tried so far will allow me to jog the motors through LinuxCNC.

I’m using a Mesa 7i76e as the sole control board. I’m using the CW-5045 microstep control driver and a Nema 23 stepper motor (23HS2430B). My stepper motor is listed for 3 amps, but I set the microstep control driver to 2.8 amps with the jumpers. My control board has power, although I’m using the P3 (5v) connector, not field power. I’m able to connect to the Mesa control board by using the command mesaflash –device 7i76e –addr 10.10.10.10 –readhmid. That means that I’ve got the W3 jumper correctly configured and basic networking is setup between the PC and the Mesa card.

The microstep drivers are getting power from a 36v (11amp) power supply and the light is green on the both the power supply and drivers. The microstep drivers are connected to the stepper motors and confirmed multiple times that the wires are paired correctly (in my case red/green and blue/yellow). I have the microstep driver connected to the Mesa card on TB2 (starting at S/D 0). Each section of TB2 has 6 connectors and the first (ground) and last (5v) are ignored with Step-, Step+, Dir- and Dir+ connected to Pull-, Pull+, Dir-, Dir+ (respectively) on the microstep control driver.

From LinuxCNC site, I’ve installed and run Wheezy, Stretch (R12 AMD64) and Stretch (R13 AMD64). I’ve tried running PNCConf on all 3 versions with no success. I ensured that I could ping the Mesa card and run mesaflash from the PC to the Mesa card with no problems. I also modified the .hal file to ensure that the IP address was 10.10.10.10 for the Mesa card configuration. The motors will not jog.

I’m looking for some things to try, but I have a few thoughts. For the wiring from the microstep control driver and the Mesa card, I’m using wire from a Arduino kit I already had. I don’t know what the guage is, but it’s certainly pretty thing. I stripped it properly and it’s seated correctly, but is there a minimum guage to use for the pulse connections? My best guess is that this is a configuration issue, but I don’t know what else to try from that end.

Any help would be appreciated and thanks in advance.

Matt