Retrofitting a 1986 Maho MH400E

YUWALEDTV <<< had to leave, forgot to add the link to what he was spamming !

Hello Andreas,

i have done no deeper look into marks component yet, because i have written my own comps for that...

I would suggest to trigger an gear/ speedchange only with an transition from spindle off to on.
So if the spindle stopps (m5) and speed-abs is set to zero, nothing is done, if you do the next spindle start (m3/m4) the actuall speed-abs is used for selecting the propper gear stage. with this you can select neutral if wanted with s0 M3.

With this machine seamless speed change is not needed, related to this you will always have an spindle stop before an speed change....

Hi Andreas,
I saw that the deckel gearbox was similar, but with no end stops to the shifter shafts.  Cool that it was useful for your Deckel. Remember the rules... photos or it didnt happen! Or better, a link to a video of the gearbox under LinixCNC control.

That behaviour of the gearbox.comp putting the gearbox in neutral each time the spindle stops is an unfortunate side effect of LinuxCNC behavior of interpreting an M5 as both spindle stop and spindle speed zero. I didn't know that when I spec'd the comp. db1981's input is a good one, to stop it reacting to a neutral and off command. Jin wrote a minor mod to the comp to stop it doing that neutral thing, which I think is also up there and is the one I am using, but it has the side effect of never going into neutral, so If I want neutral for swinging an indicator, I have to hunt for the big allen key, and manually shift the gearbox.

I am no coder (I cant read what Jin did), and also a weak Github user. I passed your  request on to Jin, to ask how he wants the Github done.
I also have the issue that I could not identify a free pin to net to to turn the spindle on or off from the physical control panel. Jin and I talked about making a big change. Currently the Comp requests spindle on / off from LinuxCNC and linuxCNC implements that. We were going to switch it around to give the comp control of the hardware. and have linuxCNC request spinlde on/off to the Comp. But we never got around to it. On the Maho the brake is hard wired through contactors, so I didn't need to do anything. Switching on the spindle contactor on switches off the brake and vice versa.

The CW /CWW on the maho is also hard wired contactors, which I am controlling from the Mesa 7i84 through the MAHO 24V relay board. The Comp does use them to rock the gearbox back and forward during changes to ensure meshing, but through LinuxCNC.

Hi Andreas,

to be honest I did not look into the code for a long time (although - yes, I did promise Mark to rework it - sorry man, still did not get to it!); the issue we had was that LinuxCNC seemed to be more oriented towards VFD driven systems which did not match with my initial design of treating speed 0 as "neutral gear".

My idea to work around this problem was to put more logic around speed control and manage speed changes and shifting in some smart way where stop would not automatically mean "neutral". From the top of my head this also has influence on reporting the current speed, I think right now that is still bound to "which gear am I in?". So those changes - that is the part I never got to...

> Also I want to provide the finished comp and .c .h files with a wiki as soon as I am done. Do you want to include it in your github or should I create my own?

Are there many changes or can the comp be adapted to handle both machines via some #ifdefs at compile time?

If we can share code, then it'd make sense to fork the original repo, add your changes there and then submit a PR against upstream to get your changes merged.

Kind regards,
Jin

Wonderful. So a
net spindle.enable to an in pin of the comp and a simple if in the comp
if (spindle.enable==0){
return
}
That will work. I will also handle the relays for ccw/cw and slow/fast in the comp.
Thanks

Hi Jin thanks for your reply.
A combined repo / comp would work.
I use less inputs and haven't changed the program that much apart from some True/False statements. Everything could be handled by #ifdefs.

For now everything works with the gearbox. I will try to finish the PID setup / Homing and the wiring by Thursday. Friday I leave for Spain and will work on the rest and the combined comp after I am back.

Thanks again.
Stay healthy
Andreas