Hurco Hawk 5M Retrofit w/ existing motors

The servo rotates smoothly on battery power. Is there a real quick "sanity check" I can perform to make sure I'm communicating with the 7i77 as well as the 5i25?

if you set an output voltage with the open loop test you should be able to read that voltage on the 7I77 outputs

The open loop test doesn't seem to work, can this be done from the command line?

Can you launch the pncconf created linuxcnc hal file?

No, it gives me an error about maxscale no being available or something like that. I just noticed this in the 7i77manual:
In normal operation CR1 through CR7 must always be on. At power-up, CR15
should be off and CR16 on. The red LED CR16 indicates a watchdog fault, which is
expected before host communications are established. Once running, CR15 should blink
at about 1 Hz for a 1 KHz update rate, and CR16 should be off. Note: CR15 and CR16 are
only present in revision B or greater 7I77 cards.
CR1 isn't lit on my card.

I have the jumpers set to use the 5v from the host card. Do you think I need to hook up an external 5vcd supply> could that be the problem?

Yes, as the 7I77 manual suggests, you can do simple tests with 5V from the FPGA card with a 7I77 but its almost guaranteed not to work well if you attempt to power a number of older (and high power consumption) encoders.

However I would expect some power drop in this case but I still would expect CR1 to be on (since it will light dimly even at ~3V) So you may have a jumpering error or a external short on the encoder wiring so I would check this carefully before proceeding

Jumpering

5V from 5I25
5I25 W2 up
7I77 W5 left

5V from 7I77 TB1
5I25 W2 down
7I77 W5 right

Right again, as usual, I had W1 up and W2 down, after witching W2 to up I can now get encoder reading through the open loop test, I can also very the correct voltages and switching on the output pins. Still no movement though, I may have forgotten to check one of the limit switches. It'll take just a couple of minutes to recheck that wiring. I can't thank you enough for all the help you've been thus far. I feel like I've very close to having this setup all hashed out.

I fixed the limit switch, I had it wired NO and it needed to be NC. It's working now!

Just posting a quick update and big thank you for patiently answering my stupid questions. I've yet to map the ballscrews but tunning looks good to me anyway. I got it to a little better than .0002" which is good enough for the work I do. I read in one post on here that the best case scenario is 2 encoder pulses.Was wondering what you guys thought? Is it good or should I still keep tweaking?