Expectations of functionality

[charles...@gmail.com]

Bottom line... nothing seems to work except the e-switch

Some two years ago I loaded up a Jessie distribution and had some measure of success with a BBB and a CRAMPS V1.0 board. running linuxcnc.

I should point out that this particular system is a freaking mechanical nightmare with well over 20 degrees of freedom, at last count 2 lasers, 2 FDM heads, multiple cameras, ink jet printer head, various vacuum switches, blowers, fans, and 7 steppers. It takes up a full 6' high instrument rack. There are multiple controllers, full up Linux boxes, mesa 7i92,  a Raspi. and multiple arduinos.

And then I decided to "Improve things". ...

Needless to say, just making the various components talk to each other is challenge enough, and when something doesn't work it is especially frustrating.

Presently I'm trying to get a BBB and CRAMPS V1.0 running bone-debian-9.9-machinekit-armhf-2019-06030-4gb working. I am quite certain that it is not the distribution that is not working, nor the hardware. I had the same problem running an earlier circa 2017 Jessie distribution.

The hal firmware is machinekit/configs/ARM../CRAMPS

I've just loaded the latest RCN release, followed the advice of machinekoder and typed in machinekit on the command line. Ta Da came up like magic! Well done guys!!!!

So, my expectation was and is that the steppers should step .. they don't.

The bed and extruder should heat up .. nope

Must have missed something. Presently I am at a loss.  Where is the magic switch that allows everything to function? Is there another switch besides e-stop that has this power to frustrate?

I had thought that it might be the PRU but I see that uio is loaded so it's not that, although it wasn't at all clear in the Jessie distribution.

So, back to the original question. Is the normal expectation that in a correctly assembled system that everything should "just run" without modifying

the CRAMPS.hal or any other file?

Thanks