Purpose is simply to see that every index input is caught in hal, it's a 
test program.....there is no real purpose.

That being said, I think the test just caught onto something that I didn't 
realize might be a problem, that the index output of this particular 
encoder may be intermittently broken. I swapped the A-channel of the 
encoder into the index input of my board and it is much more reliably 
catching that pulse. Sooooo, when I get a  chance I'll yank the encoder out 
of another machine and see what happens with that......could be a false 
alarm.

On Saturday, September 14, 2019 at 2:48:24 PM UTC-4, Michael Brown wrote:
>
> I would find it easier to follow you line of thought in this bug report if 
> you would state the purpose..
> So why ?
> And what are you trying to achieve ?
>
> On Saturday, 14 September 2019 20:04:42 UTC+2, justin White wrote:
>>
>> Doing a little testing on my hardware I noticed there is an issue with 
>> encoder indexes being missed while trying to count them. It's difficult in 
>> hal to see the index pin change state on an encoder with reasonable 
>> resolution because the change in state is very short. So I added the 
>> function in my GUI to count up the encoder index pulses  because it's 
>> obviously more visible when a number increments up vs trying to catch a 
>> small blip in halshow or halcmd. I noticed the index pulses are missed 
>> spinning the encoder at anything other than a very slow speed. I'm not 
>> really sure what communication method mksocfpga uses between the fpga and 
>> the cpu but I figured I'd try running a few non-fp components in a 0.2ms 
>> base thread to see if it helped. Didn't really seem to help at all
>>
>> I first tried this by routing the hm2<board>index-input hal pin into the 
>> updown component and sending the counts to a hal label in my gui. My first 
>> thought is that the state change is too short for the servo-thread to catch 
>> at 1ms, so I added the "edge" component to extend the length of the 
>> index-input on it's output but that didn't really help. The output of edge 
>> obviously only get's extended if it catches the input state change which it 
>> does no better than updown.
>>
>> The conclusion I'm drawing is that the RT behavior of the CPU or the 
>> communication between the FPGA and CPU cores is too slow for whatever 
>> reason, that or there's some issue with the encoder module in mksocfpga's 
>> hm2. I'm using 3 channels of a quad differential receiver chip for each 
>> encoder input. There is no difference between the index channel and A-B 
>> channels hardware wise, and this is the same on 6 identical instances of 
>> encoder inputs. The only difference is that hm2 counts the A-B channels in 
>> the FPGA while the index is not. I haven't seen any indication of missed 
>> counts on the A-B channels counting 4000 edges in quadrature. I've messed 
>> with the hm2 encoder sample-frequency too which also did not help. The only 
>> thing that helped somewhat is running a 0.5ms servo-thread but it still 
>> missed quite a few index's, and this is with me spinning the encoder by 
>> hand.
>>
>> I use this same model of encoder on a LinuxCNC machine with a Mesa 7i96 
>> and again on a 7i76e and I've never really seen an index missed on those 
>> spindle motors at ~3000rpms. If this isn't an issue with the hm2 encoder 
>> module itself I'd expect to see the same issue with a normal GPIO input 
>> missing short/fast pulses but I would think that someone else would have 
>> noticed that issue by now?
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>

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