Notice: My Pluto-P board was fried because of a short in the Power connection so I am not using it any more. It was quite a pain to get it to work and I am using this post to help other users who happen to have bought a Pluto-P board so that they have easier experiences.
I wanted to use a Pluto-P Board for LinuxCNC since I had already bought this board I wanted to try to get it to work.
Step 1: Find a PC where the hardware is supported. This was for me the biggest Problem I have Tested more than 10 Mainboards that have a paralell port. The first Step is to look up if the port supports EPP[1].
Step 2: The second step is to test if the Pluto-P firmware can be loaded. This is done by starting the LinuxCNC LiveCD running halrun in the command line and entering the following command: loadrt pluto_step If this command does not print any error(somthing like: “see dmesg for errors” ) message then you are good to go.
Step 3: Writing the hal config file for LinuxCNC. The hal config file is normally written with the StepConf wizard, but StepConf does not support Pluto-P. The best way for you to get a working config file is to use an existing example and adapt it so that it works with your machine. A working hal config is found in my github page[2]. Be sure to Notice that it is not finished because I don’t use Pluto-P any more. The description of the IO-Pins[3] and the pinout[4] can be found in the LinuxCNC Documentation.
Step 4: Adapt the ini file to Your machine parameters. This is obviously Your task, as it is not depending on Pluto-P.
Step 5: Profit!