Hurco Hawk 5M Retrofit w/ existing motors

Yes, the 5i25/7i77, 6i25/7i77 or 7i92/7i77 combinations (PCI/PCIE/Ethernet)
are Mesa's most common analog servo interface card sets and usually the
best choice if you choose Mesa cards for a analog servo+quadrature encoder
retrofit.

Thank you for confirming that detail for me. I'm servo ignorant and trying to read up on what ever information I can find. As a side note I ordered a oscilloscope that will be here Sunday just so I can test the motors and encoders before spending the $300 on the Mesa cards. Are there any other pitfalls I should look out for or am I on the right track?

Thanks a lot, guys for laying eyes on my thread here and weighing in on it. I went ahead and ordered the mesa cards, they are a week out. I'm just going to work on building me a custom ui for the machine in the mean time. I had thought about going with the Path Pilot interface but I think I'd rather build up my own based around axis. I've been reading through the pyvcp portion of the documentation and it's all very straightforward. I'd really just like to add tabs to the existing set of tabs in axis instead of creating a new est of tabs. I don't see this mentioned in the documentation or maybe I just missed it. Is there an easy way o do this?

I really want to add tabs for a tool table, work offsets and probing.

Thank for the fast reply and tip, I'll look into Gscreen and then Glade.

Okay well, I'm officially an idiot. I went through the process of designing my entire ui just to have it not load. I can load it with gladevcp from the command line but there are tabs missing when I do it this way. I went back to the page you reference and worked through the little example that they give to make sure I didn't miss something. Problem is that it won't load either. It gives me two errors, the first:

Gscreen encountered an error. The following information may be useful in troubleshooting:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 1345, in on_feed_hold_changed
self.widgets.hal_toggleaction_pause.set_active(h["feed-hold"])
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 185, in __getattr__
if r is None: raise AttributeError, "No widget %r" % attr
AttributeError: No widget 'hal_toggleaction_pause'

and the second:

Gscreen encountered an error. The following information may be useful in troubleshooting:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 3688, in <module>
app = Gscreen()
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 723, in __init__
self.initialize_widgets()
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 829, in initialize_widgets
self.init_dynamic_tabs()
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 901, in init_dynamic_tabs
self.set_dynamic_tabs()
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 2892, in set_dynamic_tabs
nb = self.widgets[name]
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 189, in __getitem__
if r is None: raise IndexError, "No widget %r" % attr
IndexError: No widget 'vcp_box'

Any ideas? I know its something silly that I over looked.

Here it is. I save it as GTKBuilder format, I read somewhere that the other files format is depreciated and its recommend to just not use it. That is unless I got that backwards. As a side note, I just stumbled across gmoccapy. Actually I don't know how I missed it on the list of included UIs, Its almost exactly what I was wanting in the first place. I may just experiment with adding extra pages/tabs to it for probing and my toolbox cycles.

Well, I've got the mesa cards, set the jumpers and flashed with the 7i77x2 firmware, applied 24vcd for field voltage, tested the cards via cli. I've been determining all of the pinouts and relative connections on the servo drive and motors. I've read a few other threads on here as well as some I found via google. I can see where I need to hook up encoder a and b and then the differential output on the 7i77. I'm not sure what to do with the tach signal from the motor, z encoder or brake. Does LinuxCNC make use of these out of the box or does it require me to do a lot of extra work to implement?