Difference between revisions of "Mesa Electronics"

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(added halrun command)
(added daughterboard pinout querying options for mesaflash)
 
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<pre>mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --readhmid</pre>
 
<pre>mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --readhmid</pre>
  
To flash a new bitfile, issue this command:
+
Newer versions of <code>mesaflash</code> can also cross reference the terminal block pinout if you tell it what daughterboard is being used in combination with the configuration. For example, for a <code>7i96</code> 25-pin daughter board connected to a <code>7i92</code> Ethernet FPGA card, where you might use the <code>7i92_7i76x1D.bit</code> pre-made configuration, the pins can be queried:
 +
 
 +
<pre>mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --readhmid --dbname1 7i76</pre>
 +
 
 +
To flash a new bitfile, issue a command such as this:
  
 
<pre>mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --write 7i92_7i77x2.bit</pre>
 
<pre>mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --write 7i92_7i77x2.bit</pre>

Latest revision as of 11:20, 29 July 2021

Overview

Mesa Electronics is a company that sells LinuxCNC compatible FPGA cards/boards and expansion boards.

Connectivity

Their cards are traditionally PCI or PCI-Express interfaced, but there are also Ethernet connected cards. The Ethernet solution is often more convenient for several reasons:

  1. remote location
  2. electrical isolation
  3. requires only a free Ethernet port on the host

Firmware

For the ethernet based boards, the firmware can be flashed over the network using the mesaflash utility. You must know which board it is, and the IP address of the board. The board can usually have jumpers set to have a fixed known IP, so as long as you manually configure the ethernet interface of the host to be within the same subnet as the card, you should be able to ping it.

For example, the default IP is usually 192.168.1.121:

ping 192.168.1.121

And you can read the current configuration of the card using the following command:

mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --readhmid

Newer versions of mesaflash can also cross reference the terminal block pinout if you tell it what daughterboard is being used in combination with the configuration. For example, for a 7i96 25-pin daughter board connected to a 7i92 Ethernet FPGA card, where you might use the 7i92_7i76x1D.bit pre-made configuration, the pins can be queried:

mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --readhmid --dbname1 7i76

To flash a new bitfile, issue a command such as this:

mesaflash --device 7i92 --addr 192.168.1.121 --write 7i92_7i77x2.bit

The board must be power cycled after flashing for the new firmware/settings to take effect.

To test the configuration, and make sure any "smart serial" daughterboards are being discovered, you can manually load the hostmot2 driver using halrun (use the appropriate IP, and config="..." parameter if necessary):

# in the Linux shell
halrun
# within the halrun command prompt
loadrt hostmot2
loadrt hm2_eth board_ip="192.168.1.121"

Ethernet Boards

25-pin boards

50-pin boards

PCI Boards

25-pin boards

50-pin boards

PCI-Express Boards

25-pin boards

50-pin boards

Parallel Port Boards

25-pin boards

50-pin boards

Online Resources

http://www.mesanet.com/

http://store.mesanet.com/