From Grbl to linuxcnc

Im an electronics technician located in Denmark with an hobby interest in mechanical design, cnc milling and additive manufacturing.

A couple of years ago I bought an cnc router with zero experience in the field. The building and electrical parts where a breeze and the grbl controller that I bought back then was an easy thing to flash with fluidNC and get going. 

Now I'm going into more advanced features and adding an self designed atc system hereby arose the need for a more capable controller. The choice settled on the Mesanet 7c80 due to form factor with the rpi and the number of i/o without the need for an daughterboard.

I have experience with rpi/arduino/esp32 projects and have worked a limited bit with commercial fpga cards before.

I have never worked with Linuxcnc before but settled on this environment and the mesa board due to:
1. active community 
2. Full customization

So the big question is, where do I begin? What would be a good course of action to get going in an orderly manner? 

The hardware:
clossed loop steppers and drivers
XYYZ + AB (possible used to manipulated the ATC later)
inductive sensors on all axis
several solunoidvalves (mist and air)
several relays (pumps and spindle light)
surface probe
tool lenght sensor
several failsafe and e-stops
ballscrews on all axis

The atc system will be an add on later and will not be a part of the initial setup.

The electrical part is going to be an non issue for me I have already planned this from the drawings in the 7c80 manual.

Thanks in advance



 

RPi5 will need to have hm2_spix driver loaded
RPi4 will need to have hm2_rpspi driver loaded

I have downloaded the image, edited the files on the image and are able to remote into the pi.

SPI has been enabled from console.

Currently waiting on time to do the hardware modification of desoldering the male header and soldering on a female header on the bottom of the Pi 4

So i've been tinkering a little and getting to learn the new enviroment.I have made my basic configuration of a .HAL file for linuxCNC, don't mind that the I/O pins are not defined correct in relation to my hardware.When defining the outputs i stumpled upon the .CFG file that defines for example RS-485 spindle control over modbus.I have linked the 2 files as .txt could anyone please give feedback and advice.TIA.