On 7 February 2012 01:34, Erik Friesen <e...@aercon.net> wrote: > I feel like I'm fumbling a bit for information on the mesa cards. Is the > firmware open source? How does one go about configuring the card? I have > a bit of experience with embedded electronics, but working with this is a > bit new to me. How configurable is the spi?
The SPI is a bit too configurable, and in effect you have to write a sub-driver for any specific new hardware. There is a tool in LinuxCNC for writing real-time drivers and components called comp http://www.linuxcnc.org/docview/html/hal_comp.html To use the Mesa-card BSPI modules you need to write yourself a realtime component using comp. Currently there is only one example which is used by another Mesa card (the 7i65 8x servo control card) http://git.linuxcnc.org/gitweb?p=emc2.git;a=blob;f=src/hal/drivers/mesa_7i65.comp;h=41bcc37e2a9ab42c4cc00547a20955f7624650a1;hb=HEAD That card has 8x analogue inputs and 8x analogue outputs handled by on-board SPI devices. I think that, for your requirements, a Pico or Mesa board to handle the encoder counting and realtime stuff and a USB-connected Arduino would work well. Bear in mind that even with an encoder the best you can do with steppers is detect a stall or missed steps, recovery isn't really possible as driving a stepper harder == faster only makes things worse. -- atp The idea that there is no such thing as objective truth is, quite simply, wrong. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
