I recently picked up a PCNC 1100 that didn’t come with a controller. (Long story) After doing a little research, I learned that Pathpilot is a effectively LinuxCNC with a custom interface and they used Mesa 5i25 cards for the old PCI versions and 7i92 for the newer ethernet ones.
Knowing this, I decided I’d be better off using an old NUC PC I had laying around and ordered a 7i92 directly from Mesa. What I didn’t realize, is that Mesa had discontinued the various versions of the 7i92 and replaced them with “T” versions - i.e.: 7i92th. After talking with Mesa, apparently the new versions us a different FPGA that would require Tormach to update their drivers/firmware. I reached out to Tormach support to see if they had any plans to support the newer versions of these cards and the only response I got was “we only support the card sold on our website”, which would be PN 51807- “DB25 Interface kit”, which just appears to be a 7i92 or 7i92m with a fancy enclosure…and hefty price tag.
With all that said, I’m now stuck with a PC and a Mesa card that won’t quite work with Pathpilot. My only options are to either purchase the $300+ card from Tormach, or try to write new firmware and tweak Pathpilot to work with the new cards…which I would risk breaking every time PP updates.
Knowing that Mesa has discontinued the old 7i92 cards, Tormach is surely going to have to address this soon unless they have thousands of the old cards on hand. Just trying to figure out if/when that may happen.
Buy the tormach replacement if you want to cut metal. Someone on the Linux cnc boards might have a solution but your going to always wonder what might happen when you hit run. Breaking expensive tooling adds up.
Interesting. I need to do a little more diagnostics then. I can’t rule out something else being wrong with the machine at this point. I did manually update to the latest version via a USB drive so in theory it should be working.
I’m using a 7i92th with an IDC 26 ribbon cable from it directly to the Tormach board. (Bypassing the DB25 converter/cable). The lights on the 7i92 change when I fire up Pathpilot so I know it’s at least trying to communicate, but it just stays on the “attempting to communicate with mill” screen and never connects.
Could you possible walk me through what the standard startup procedure is supposed to be? i.e.: I turn on the main disconnect knob on the side of the control box, the boot up the PC, which goes straight to PP. And that’s where it gets stuck.
I am not entirely following your set up and all of my knowledge is centered on the current 440. For that machine the PP controller connects to the 7i92 via ethernet. Then the 25pin cable connects between the 7i92 and the control cabinet.
The T version of the 7i92 drivers have been include with PathPilot updates for a while, certainly 2.10.1 . The 1100 .ini files all include T and non-T driver loading.
Make sure that the jumper on the 7i92 is set to use 10.10.10.10 as IP address, and make sure it is the only device on your ethernet. And if you have more than 1 ethernet board, take one out. (Linux can not predictably keep an interface as eth0 for some reason. If you need/want you controller connected to internet then use WiFi.
I thought I had looked in to the IP and that the jumpers in the shipped position defaulted back to the eeprom IP. Nope! Just looked at the 7i92 manual again and saw that J6 needed to be moved to the up position.
One simple change and she started right up and so far it looks like everything’s working as expected!
Now I just need to pick up some tooling and run this thing through its paces!