Inquiry of EMC2's hardware capatability-

[p27182]

Hey people-

n00b here, been perusing the site for some time during my harbor freight conversion project (seig x1)...

Bought probotix db25 breakout, and their drivers for unipolar motors, which I'm told appear to work fine by their tech support...

problem is, my motherboard doesnt have a parallel port (asus p5b-d) so I was thinking about buying this computer at geeks.com...

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=WSYS146-R

It's obviously got a parallel port but I'm just a lil' skeptical about the function of the paralell port- and whether it's compatible

can I get some of your opinions on whether or not I should snatch this thing up?

Thanks for any input...

I'm on a limited budget and would like to thank all of ya for bein the go-getters you are. I can't wait to have a cnc of my own.

-pat

[acondit]

Originally Posted by p27182 Hey people- n00b here, been perusing the site for some time during my harbor freight conversion project (seig x1)... Bought probotix db25 breakout, and their drivers for unipolar motors, which I'm told appear to work fine by their tech support... problem is, my motherboard doesnt have a parallel port (asus p5b-d) so I was thinking about buying this computer at geeks.com... http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=WSYS146-R It's obviously got a parallel port but I'm just a lil' skeptical about the function of the paralell port- and whether it's compatible can I get some of your opinions on whether or not I should snatch this thing up? Thanks for any input... I'm on a limited budget and would like to thank all of ya for bein the go-getters you are. I can't wait to have a cnc of my own. -pat

Pat,

My concern would not be the parallel port's compatibility as much as the "integrated video". That seems to be the biggest source of latency problems. I have two different computers with onboard video and one worked fine with EMC2 under 6.06 but on the other I had to add a new video board. The one that worked fine with 6.06 had problems initially when I upgraded to 8.04.

Could you add a pci parallel port card to your system?

Alan

[cadmonkey]

I picked up a single port PCI parallel card locally for less than $20. Works fine in EMC. Much easier than buying a motherboard without firsthand knowledge it will perform. If your current machine without an on-board parallel port gets good results on the latency test then try a card first.

If you do buy one then make sure you add its latency performance to the wiki list.

[p27182]

thanks for the replies!
and my bad its takin me so long to re-reply...
anywho...

I did put a PCI parallel card in my asus p5b deluxe but no workie-

I suspect I might have the "Port Address" wrong in the ports n pins section of Mach 3 because there's no activity on the wires, I'm probing at them with an oscope and seeing nothing but noise- as ive heard of other people having this problem with a pci parallel card ... how do I find this information? If it's in my bios, I really can't find it, it must be hidden well or maybe in different context?

but if it's not that, it could be the other setting in my bios seeing as my pc is quite overclocked... with several voltages and some clocks modified...

thanks again for any help or advice.
-pat

[cadmonkey]

If you're running Linux (for EMC) then you use lspci -v to get the details of everything connected to the PCI interface - you can find the peripheral you are looking for and the address. I think you need to run this as root to get all the addresses so it would be sudo lspci -v
This wiki page http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?NetMos details finding a PCI parallel port card.

In Windows you'll look in the hardware manager, find the card and see what address is assigned to the card.

[Big John T]

Originally Posted by p27182 I did put a PCI parallel card in my asus p5b deluxe but no workie- I suspect I might have the "Port Address" wrong in the ports n pins section of Mach 3 because there's no activity on the wires, I'm probing at them with an oscope and seeing nothing but noise- as ive heard of other people having this problem with a pci parallel card ... how do I find this information? If it's in my bios, I really can't find it, it must be hidden well or maybe in different context? -pat

Well you could read the manual

http://www.linuxcnc.org/docview/html...AQ.html#r1_6_1

http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emc..._A_MPG_Pendant

Hmmm, I need to add the hardware examples to the html docs the above two links should clear it up for you. Or look in the Hardware Examples section of the Integrator Manual.

John

[p27182]

Hey guys- I very much appreciate the willingness to help- and yes, the reference to the manual is appreciated too!

It turns out that the driver for my PCI card was not fully installed .. and I had to do some trial and error with the port's address...

but it works now, so


I was hoping for a dancing end mill or something but the banana will hafta do haha

Thanks again!
-pat