Holding a pin on?

My machine is a HY-TB5 5 axis Chinese machine that come ready with Mach 3 instruction for setup. There was another post somewhere on the forums but no one gave a complete setup.
I have been running it on Mach for 2 years almost, so everything is functional.

I have went through and tried the MACH.xml converter but it seemed to have the wrong settings especially in the motor settings so I did a custom. When the motor was set I do not get action from the motor but the motor audibly engages and the breakout board with its on board readout is getting the signal.

The best I can tell I have relay on the stepper driver that needs to be engaged so the power can get through. This requires a 5 volt input on pin 14 of the parallel port. Mach 3 had setting for it PORT1 Pin14 high. When it came time to mill it just came on, then went off after the code ran.

I tried this:In my Custom.hal. No resolve, but it looks like that just tells the pin its an OUT.

How do I tell it to turn the pin on and keep it on?? Still to new to all this to quite understand the docs but I am not sure that I even found what I was looking for.

Thanks
Matt

That statement links (wires) the "relay-enable.power-on" signal
to the pin "parport.0.pin-14-out" so "parport.0.pin-14-out"
will follow the state of "relay-enable.power-on"

For this to be of any use, some other pin must drive the signal "relay-enable.power-on"

Note that signal names (like "relay-enable.power-on") are arbitrary, they have no intrinsic meaning so "relay-enable.power-on" could be replaced with "Blue_White_Wire" everywhere in the hal file(s) and the operation would be unchanged.

In stepConfig on the pin assignment page, for pin 14 select "Amplifier Enable"

Easy peasy.

I am confused but I think I follow you. Would you mind giving me the process for holding pin 14 on while linuxcnc is running? I have been trying to find an example but with no resolve.
I know it has to turn on for the drivers to work because I went through something similar running mach3 on a laptop that had 3.2v signal. The relay wouldn't engage. 5v needed.
Linux is daunting but I know I can do it sooner or later. I just have to run across enough challenging problems then I'll eventually come around.

Thanks
Matt

OttoDidact wrote:

In stepConfig on the pin assignment page, for pin 14 select "Amplifier Enable"

Easy peasy.

Your message came in while I was replying.

Thanks a bunch I'll try it.

Matt

Ya that did it. I have to work on my stepper config a bit everything is moving real slow but at least its moving and looks to be in line with whats on the screen.

Thanks a bunch both of you.
Matt

just to add for completeness:
If someone requires an always-on-pin for say testing - you can invert the pin in stepconf and it will be on when linuxcnc is loaded.

Chris M

Well actually thats the first thing I tried, both invert and non invert neither worked. "Amplifier on" worked. Not sure what the difference was but just setting the pin as an OUT isn't enough.

When this is done I am going to document this machine because I think they are conman and they need to move to this Linuxcnc system before even just making it easy on themselves using mach 3.

Thanks all.
Matt

Right, Should have said if you pick say digital output (that you don't need) and invert it that should work.