You should be able to use anything supported by Machinekit to generate
step/dir pulses, and last I knew most of the Mesa hardware was
supported. The pins/parameters thing relates to Machinekit generally
dropping support for parameters in favor of pins. This was for a
variety of reasons, but mostly because it allowed for making components
instantiable at run-time, eg: eliminating the need to know ahead of time
exactly how many instances of some component you might need for your HAL
file.
Most of the Mesa driver logic (eg: the HM2 driver) should be working in
Machinekit, or at least it was when I was playing with Mesa VHDL code in
the FPGA+SoC platforms a while back. Each individual card then has a
small shim of code to handle the different communications protocols (eg:
PCI/PCIe, EPP, SPI, Ethernet, etc).
On 9/9/2021 4:39 PM, Jakub Kaminski wrote:
Dear Machinekit Community,
*tl;dr:*
Machinekit uses HAL Pins for ROS bindings which is (or was?) nonstandard
for Mesa cards (which uses params). Can I use any Mesa card with ROS and
Machinekit for Step-dir control? (Looking at 7i92 + daughter cards). Trying
to validate what I read online.
*Full message:*
Impressed by the possibilities that Machinekit + ROS offer and your great
work at:
hal_ros_control <https://github.com/zultron/hal_ros_control>package
(@Zultron @Luminize @Machinekoder),
ros_hal_tests <https://github.com/cdsteinkuehler/ros_hal_tests>
(@Cdsteinkuehler)
ros_hello_machinekit <https://github.com/luminize/ros_hello_machinekit>
(@Luminize )
I would like to ask some compatibilty questions.
As @Luminize stated in ros_hello_machinekit repository
<https://github.com/luminize/ros_hello_machinekit> :
*depending on the hardware you will need to use this machinekit branch (no
support !!!)
<https://github.com/luminize/machinekit/tree/hostmot-remove-params2> which
uses pins instead of params for the mesa hardware stepgen. BEWARE only
tested on a mesa 5i20 card. YMMV *
I plan to buy 7i92 + daughter step/dir card just in case my parallel port
is not good enough. Will it work with Machinekit + ROS without much
modifications? Do I need to apply some custom branch or some other hacking?
Thank you for your time devoted to this and making these meaningful
contributions, which are a real game-changer for robotics researchers.
Best regards,
Jakub
--
Charles Steinkuehler
[email protected]
--
website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github:
https://github.com/machinekit
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