Remora - ethernet NVEM / EC300 / EC500 cnc board

Hello, this is a reply to beauxnez post from few days ago.

"hello, is it possible to make an nvem card work with qtplasmac?"

 The answer is yes, another friend and myself are right at the end of a plasma machine build, were using a ec500 as the controller and it works fantastic with qtplasmac. I will say the THC is the only thing that we don't have working at the moment. On ours the plasma output is just on output 1, torch is either on or off. It goes from the board and turns a relay on and off which is the actual switch. For ours we have a Everlast 82i for the plasma cutter which has a 50:1 voltage divider, that gives us a 0 - 5v output for the torch voltage but from my understanding there aren't any analog inputs on these boards. A analog to digital converter may be a option. I'm not sure what the output of the mesa THCAD boards looks like, there may be a way to use one of those. I'm just getting started on trying to setup a arduino to take the analog voltage, work some magic on it, and send the info to linuxcnc that way using modbus.  The downside I'm seeing to this approach is effectively I'm setting up a second controller to take just one analog input, and I'll have to put a switch inline on the ethernet cables.  The upside is another controller and analog input, so now I can dream up more features to add to this machine (During our build process it started as a basic machine, we now have individual limit switches for every axis, probing, etc. , touchscreen interface, and so on..) 

Here's the ini and hal files of of my machine.  These are off of a plasma running a ec500 and QTPlasmaC, machine is fully operational with the exception of THC.  I'm in the us so the machine is set up for imperial units.  The machine has two motors on the x axis moving the gantry (Joint 0 and 3).  Other things to note is the breakaway on the torch has two prox switches on in hence the need for the and2 component on those and we have a WHB04 wireless pendant so that is loaded in the ini file. The limits are all micro switches, and there are separate prox switches for homing on the x and y axis.  The z axis uses the same switch for limit + and homing.  If I remember right I started with the generic hal that came with remora and tweaked it from there.  Just take it one input at a time.

If I remember in the next day or so, I'll post the .ini and .hal for our machine. I have a working machine running on a ec500. That way you can dig through it and be totally confused by it, lol.

hello, thank you for your help I will receive my card in a week
did you go through the stepconf?

you can try that. I tested it works but the voltage divider gave up the ghost

github.com/memisibram/Arduino-Plasma-THC...r%20all%20controller  

  on stm32 chips there are 8 analog inputs

The configuration wizards don't really work for this application. If I remember right I ran one config just to look at the files it produced it think I told it a 7i96 mesa. You'll end up with a bunch of stuff that is clearly mesa specific. I'm thinking I copied the qtplasmac stuff out of that file though. But the files I posted I just started with the basic config that comes with the remora files from github. Hence why they are still named ec-500, I left the remora related stuff in there pretty much untouched, and just started adding to it. From there I started working through it adding one pin at a time. Using halshow in qtplasmac is going to be one of your best friends through that process.  Did you build.your own divider?  The plasma cutter were using has one built into it.  We currently have a standalone thc (proma sd, it came with the machine, wouldn't have been my choice) on our machine but it doesn't want to play nice with the divider that is in the cutter.  Plus having the thc on the main control screen would be much better that a standalone thc unit.  What I'm currently thinking is to put the arduino in the box that our current thc is occupying and where using modbus comes into play is I should be able to send the data back to the computer over ethernet.  I'm trying to avoid using usb to avoid as much potential for interference as possible.  

the voltage divider was made by a friend, I ordered the components to make this one

github.com/memisibram/Plasma_Voltage_Divider