I'm pleased to announce version 0.1 of m7i43_hm2, a HAL driver for the new Mesa Electronics 7i43 board with the HostMot2 firmware (short for Host Motion Control 2). Information about the 7i43 is available at <http://mesanet.com/>, click on "MOTION CONTROL" on the left and scroll down to the 7i43 section.
The 7i43 plugs in to a PC's parallel port. It has an FPGA with 200K or 400K gates and 48 I/O pins (in addition to the parallel port). It is powered by 5V from a USB port or from an external power supply (the USB port is used for power only, all communication is over the parallel port, in EPP mode). The HostMot2 firmware is highly flexible, and can include quadrature decoders, PWM generators, and step/dir generators, in addition to gpios. Full VHDL source code for the firmware is included. Also included are several precompiled firmware binaries supporting 4 servos and 4 steppers, or 8 servos, on a single 7i43 board. The driver is very immature. Lots of firmware features are currently unsupported. I'm aiming for full support in the next few months. I am trying to be compliant with the Canonical Device Interfaces as far as possible. The driver can currently configure the 7i43's FPGA with the HostMot2 firmware, and has very basic support for the encoder and pwmgen features. 4 channel servo control is possible at 4 KHz (read the encoders from the board, run the pid software component, and update the pwmgens on the board). I am grateful to Peter Wallace at Mesa Electronics for his fantastic support of this project. Comments and suggestions are welcome, and I'm seeking brave testers! -- Sebastian Kuzminsky Immanentize the Eschaton ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
