[SOLVED] New wifi card causes second parallel port to stop working

Setup:
LinuxCNC 2.9.0 using Axis, configured with Stepconf
Dell Precision Workstation T3500, 8g ram
Radeon HD 5700
Two identical Sunix PCIe parallel port cards
Mint Debian Edition 6
#1 SMP PREEMPT_RT Debian 6.1.128-1 (2025-02-07)
6.1.0-31-rt-amd64
Why do I have two parallel port cards? Some time ago, I damaged the MB parallel port.
This setup works great.

When I add a wifi card (TP-Link PCIe Wifi card AC600), the second parallel port card address changes (per dmesg). I updated the hal with Stepconf for the new address. Now in Axis, the Machine Power button is grayed out, like the estop circuit is open. Estop-in is on the second parallel port card, so I'm interpreting this as the wifi card is somehow blocking the second parallel port card.
I shutdown, removed the wifi card, updated the second parallel port card address, and it all works fine again.

Put the wifi card back in and ran ptest
forum.linuxcnc.org/18-computer/4743-parallel-port-tester   (thanks BigJohnT)
Both parallel port cards work with ptest, with the wifi card installed.

Advice will be greatly appreciated.
Steve

 

Hard to really diagnose without seeing any relevant dmesg output or any info regarding the address of the parallel ports before failure and when failed.

If ptest works Linuxcnc should work.

Why do you need wi-fi?

Wi-Fi will increase latency for your CNC system.

Your CNC PC should be as minimal as possible.

Ethernet is far better than Wi-Fi anyhow.

Why do you do this, you add nothing, it's of completely no use.
Stop being an oxygen thief and find some other forum to ply your idiocy.
Does this stuff come naturally to you or do you have to work hard to be such a waste of space ?

My apologies to the OP but the user is a menace and I just couldn't put up with his complete uselessness.

You can jam in as many parallel port cards as you have slots. They can be at any free address you have. If the on board one is buggered leaving it enabled will only affect the ISA compatible addresses, IE those hanging off the LPC bus. For the addresses allocated on the PCIe bus different realm, different interface, different bus. Hence the reason on board lpt ports don't show up via lspci, cos they are technically on the ISA bus but physically the LPC bus.

Never said it wouldn't

Only mentioned on board serial & parallel ports on the ISA bus. Which is still there only not physically.

I do have ethernet, and I do have a reason for needing wifi in addition. The camera I'm adding to the spindle sends video via wifi.

Below is dmesg output with the wifi card installed. Without it, I think everything is the same except the second card is addressed 0xdcc0 instead of 0xacc0. I can try that later if needed.

Tommylight, I do have the means to change the MB parallel port address. Sounds like something to experiment with, thanks. I have swapped slots for the wifi card and the second parallel port card, same result.

I did verify that the wifi card is known to work with Linux. I don't see why LinuxCNC would care (or know anything) about the wifi card. Any issue here?

$ dmesg | grep parport
[ 7.560447] parport_pc 00:03: reported by Plug and Play ACPI
[ 7.560518] parport0: PC-style at 0x378 (0x778), irq 7 [PCSPP,TRISTATE,EPP]
[ 7.665553] lp0: using parport0 (interrupt-driven).
[ 8.274698] parport1: PC-style at 0xbcc0 (0xbcc8), irq 30 [PCSPP,TRISTATE,EPP]
[ 8.381897] lp1: using parport1 (interrupt-driven).
[ 8.390482] parport2: PC-style at 0xacc0 (0xacc8), irq 16 [PCSPP,TRISTATE,EPP]
[ 8.493589] lp2: using parport2 (interrupt-driven).

I remembered there is a wifi PCIe card (different brand) in my desktop which won't be missed. I put it in the CNC computer and now it all works.
I also did a latency test. This is with 5 glxgears plus YouTube running a psychedelic video, plus streaming from my RPi camera. Pretty much the same as I had back in March.

In addition to my machine config described in the first post, my graphics card is a Radeon Firepro V5800. 

Thanks for the comments,
Steve