The MESA 5I25 is a general purpose programmable I/O card for the PCI bus. The low profile PCI card features standard parallel port pinouts and connectors for compatibility with parallel port interfaced motion control, CNC breakout cards, multi axis step motor drives, allowing a motion control performance boost while retaining a real-time PCI interface, says the company. Each I/O bit has individually programmable direction and function. Open source FPGA firmware configurations are provided for hardware step and direction generation, PWM generation, analogue servo control, absolute standard synchronous interface and bi-directional synchronous serial interface, incremental encoder counting, real-time remote I/O, timing, event counting, and high speed serial communication. All the I/O bits are 5V tolerant. The card has a 25pin DB25 female back panel connector and 26pin header for the second I/O port. The PCI bus interface operates at 3.3 and 5V. A jumper selectable positive temperature co-efficient protected power is offered to supply 1A of 5V voltage for the external daughtercards. According to the company, a four layer construction is used to minimise radiated EMI and provide optimum ground and power integrity. A series of daughtercards are available for industrial motion control, CNC retrofit, high speed real time I/O, and RS422 interfaces.
