New Hardware Support suggestion

[whizzo]

Dear All,
            Can I suggest someone much more knowledgeable than me take a look at Mesa Electronics

                      www.mesanet.com

           Their Anything I/O board 5i20  may be of interest to you. It uses an Xilink FPGA which you can download a multi axis servo control program to and much cheaper than a Galil !!!! BTW, I have no link at
all to Mesa Electronics,they are in California and I live in the UK.  I found out about this hardware from the
EMC2  website and forum.   IMHO, the main thing missing from Mach 2/3 is lack of support for servo driven systems.

                                                           David Winter.

[vmax549]

WOW good job, I can see a lot of MACH possibilities on this website. (;-) TP

[Garyv]

I need to check them out as well , I need to connect with a laptop and they have a usb lpt port
card that might work also it is isolated from the comp and can add 5 volt seperate power to it..
Very interesting to see if it will work..

[Garyv]

This is info from their site, if someone with more knowledge than me would look it over and give their opinion I for one would apreciate it.


7I43  FPGA based USB/EPP Anything I/O card   
 The MESA 7I43 is a low cost, general purpose programmable I/O card that connects to the host computer via USB or PC parallel port. The 7I43 uses a 200K or 400K gate Xilinx FPGA for all logic, so it is truly an Anything I/O card. The FPGA is downloadable from the USB or Parallel port bus side, and also has the capability of local configuration storage in an on card EEPROM. Efficient switching regulators are used for FPGA core and 3.3V power, allowing the 7I43 to be USB bus powered. The 7I43 can also be powered by an external 5V source. A FTDI FT245R USB interface chip is used for the USB interface. Drivers are available for Windows and Linux. The drivers avaliable for the FT245R make the software interface a simple buffered byte stream. Parallel port bus interface uses EPP mode.  A 50 MHz oscillator provides the FPGA clock. This clock can be multiplied or divided in the FPGA for other clock rates. The 7I43 has 48 I/O bits available on two 50 pin connectors. Both connectors use I/O module rack compatible pinouts. All I/O bits are 5V tolerant, and have series and parallel termination options (DCI). The I/O connectors are compatible with our 7 series daughter cards for isolated I/O, motion control and other applications. Configurations are provided for simple GPIO, Smart Motion control (SoftDMC), host based motion control (HostMot2), and a waveform generator.



DATASHEET --- MANUAL --- SUPPORT SOFTWARE

[Garyv]

Well I just spoke to tech support at Mesa electronics and since it is still USB it can be configured but i does not have
the buffer nesesary to keep up the thouroput , also they would need to speak to someone from Artsoft to get
information about setting up the programing for the card to work with Mach ...
   Oh well I tried..