well when you say hostmot2 'just works' your kinda missing a step. While the hardware always has 'just worked',
Working hardware and configured to do something with linuxcnc is two different things.
Its a little more than just the hardware that just works, its the driver that reads the IDROM to determine what hardware, what pins and what addreess need to be accessed, formats and names the data
and presents it to HAL without needing to know anything about the specific card configuration.
for the hardware to work (depends what you mean by work) it doesn't need to know scale, units, parameters etc but to do useful stuff in linuxcnc you sure do.
And with sserial cards there is now no way to predict how to use the components beside getting a unit and testing.
All I am saying is that there is more information than the hostmot2 generated XML file available from the hostmot2 driver and the HAL pins and this data is always a perfect match to what the user has. With more peripherals, software revisions and modes, a static configuration scheme quickly becomes unmanagable.
What I am getting at is that even if PNCconf can get the pin names and parameters unless it knows how to set the parameters you still can't configure the system. live interrogating is not the be all end all
Yes ancilliary info is needed for some things but a dynamically created config isl ikely better match to what the user has and more functional in the face of software revisions, new modes, and even new cards. For example for simple DIO cards why should a new card not just work without pncconf changes? Sure you may not know the physical I/O terminal pins but it should be detected and inputs and outputs
connectable
But.. I am certainly not against trying it and seeing. Maybe my reservations are not as bad as I think.
Does anyone have code for pulling info from the boards?
All pins an parameters are dynamically fetchable via halcmd (halcmd just lacks the XML output option)
it should be possible to have the driver or a simple utility create the XML version of the .pin file. The driver could also retrieve the currently unused units (that is not presented to HAL), types and perhaps scaling info for sserial pins and parameters
