Shielded ethernet cable and Mesa
linuxcnc, mesa ·tl;dr: use only shielded ethernet cable (not U/UTP), Cat doesn’t matter.
Why shielded?
Because of EMI.
In my case exactly the same setup: the same wires, the same Mesa board together with the same PC works fine while
locates fare from garage. E.g. max ping latency mentioned before is ~300us.
But when I moved the setup to the garage where CNC machine is located, max ping latency jumps to 2-3ms. LinuxCNC throw
error finishing read!
message. And no way to make it work.
And this is due to EMI. Using shielded cable solved the problem. While Mesa traffic is low there are no requirements over the cable Cat. I checked Cat5, Cat6 and Cat8 - no difference. Only shield matters. E.g. U/UTP definitely not an option, but F/UTP, S/UTP, SF/UTP and SF/FTP works fine.