First steps with halrun, hostmod2 and mesa - PeterMue/ZX45-LinuxCNC GitHub Wiki

Synopsis

This article covers the very basics on how to interact with the LinuxCNC HAL System. It's required to understand the basics of the HAL system before we can set up a LinuxCNC machine.

There is a great tutorial that covers this topic in more detail here LinuxCNC Docs: Basic HAL and here LinuxCNC Docs: HAL Tutorial.

HALRUN

The halrun command is a simple command line tool to interact with the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) of LinuxCNC.

Basically we're able to setup the entire LinuxCNC HAL configuration interactively in the halrun environment. Later we're saving all these commands in an configuration file that gets loaded when LinuxCNC starts (instead of building the config hal file from scratch, we use a sample machine configuration as base).

Especially for debugging purposes and to get a better insight whats going on, the halrun command is a very handy tool.

To start halrun, open a terminal and type halrun.

peter@LinuxCNC:~$ halrun
.
halcmd: help
Use 'help <command>' for more details about each command
Available commands:
    loadrt              Load realtime module(s)
    loadusr             Start user space program
    waitusr             Waits for userspace component to exit
    unload              Unload realtime module or terminate userspace component
    lock, unlock        Lock/unlock HAL behaviour
    linkps              Link pin to signal
    linksp              Link signal to pin
    net                 Link a number of pins to a signal
    unlinkp             Unlink pin
    newsig, delsig      Create/delete a signal
    getp, gets          Get the value of a pin, parameter or signal
    ptype, stype        Get the type of a pin, parameter or signal
    setp, sets          Set the value of a pin, parameter or signal
    addf, delf          Add/remove function to/from a thread
    show                Display info about HAL objects
    list                Display names of HAL objects
    source              Execute commands from another .hal file
    status              Display status information
    save                Print config as commands
    start, stop         Start/stop realtime threads
    alias, unalias      Add or remove pin or parameter name aliases
    echo, unecho        Echo commands from stdin to stderr
    quit, exit          Exit from halcmd

Now we're in the halrun environment. To show the available commands, type help as shown above. There is also a tab completion, so just hit once to do a autocompletion or hit twice to show all current valid commands.

Mesa Driver aka hostmot2

There is a HAL driver called hostmod2 to interact with the Mesa Firmware. The first step to talk to a mesa card is to load this driver. This can be done with these commands:

.
halcmd: loadrt hostmot2 
halcmd: loadrt hm2_pci

To show what functions, pins, etc. the mesa card (a 5i25) provides, we can use the command show:

⚠️ **GitHub.com Fallback** ⚠️