Well, it did take me a couple of days to figure it out, mostly because I really had no clue about Profibus.
The author doesn't recommend using a usb to RS485 adapter, because of the time lags that can happen with USB, although I did quickly try with one and it seemed so be working well enough. The recommended way is to use an RS232 port with a TTL to RS485 adapter like this:
I use a serial port on a pc that can be configured as an RS485 in the BIOS. In any case you just need to connect the two data lines to the device, no other connection is needed.
As for which files are needed from the github site, it's probably the easiest to just download all of it and copy the whole lot into your linuxcnc config folder. I haven't whittled it down to the bare necessities yet but the folders 'micropython' and 'phy_fpga' can be deleted right away.
Getting the configuration right takes a few steps. First you need to get the .gsd (german) or .gse (english) files from the manufacturer website as these contain the required parameter settings for the device. (note that if you use the .gse file it will need to have the extension changed to .gsd). There are some demos for linuxcnc included. Basically the file 'pyprofibus.conf' needs to be modified to set up the profibus connection ( ie port and baudrate, bus address of all the slaves and the number of input and output bytes for each of them and the path to the respective .gsd files).
One problem was that the current version of 'pyprofibus' did not support devices that don't send data back to the master during communication. The valve block only sends an acknowledge byte back and that was not recognized as a response leading to timeouts and the master shutting down. I reached out to the author on his github page ,he's really quite responsive and helpful, and got it working.
To get everything hooked up to linuxcnc and hal you need to modify 'profibus.hal' and add it to your .ini then you run the startup script provided in the demo-folders and the relevant hal pins are created.
As usual things seem very logical in retrospect but it definitely involved a bit of a learning curve.
You can actually connect extension modules with up to 32inputs and 32outputs to that valve block, but I don't have any of those.
