7i76E - Ethernet version, questions.

I'm fairly new to this linuxcnc shenanigans other than tried driving stuff off an old computer with parallell port i haven't dug into this much more.

And a friend of mine told me if i wanted to get more stuff going i should look into mesa cards. So that i did.
And boy are they confusing.

I figured out i would need something like a 7i80DB-16 - but then i noticed there were this 7i76E card for steppers.
But, would that need the 7i80DB card at all or would it be driven "solo" by itself occupying the ethernet port?
Because im guessing running the cards through like say a Switch would not be somewhat quirky or?

Hope somebody can clear this up Would be nice to be able to run ethernet based stuff instead, and shrinking the total footprint from a large box besides the machine to something more manageable. =)

The 7I76E includes the FPGA so is a stand-alone, Ethernet connected I/O
device for LinuxCNC

Ah yes a PCI card would be the easier solution but i don't really got any room for it, and planning to move to a uhm, Beaglebone i think they are called. making the whole solution a bit more compact crammed into a smaller box.

But if 7i76E is a stand alone card i', thinking that gotta be a good middleway, regarding the uspace part i already run it in uspace. Because i couldnt get the livecd working due too old drivers and such so i compiled my own kernel and built a new installation from Debian Jessie instead. Works so far with the parallell port.

The idea of using a FPGA card is to get some robustness into it.. the parallell port tends to be finnicky and the mainboard is really old.

I've yet to fire up my 7i76E as I'm still building the machine and have not even started on the electronics. However, I did notice after upgrading to V 2.7 that that pcconf includes tabs specifically to set up the 7i76E even though I have no hardware connected to the PC. I originally installed from the Live CD.

You do need a single point to point ethernet connection to the card so you'll need to connect to your network via a second ethernet interface or use wifi.

Nice i need to take a look at that then.. hard trying to decide for what hardware.