VMC related HAL questions.

andypugh wrote:

sspeed33317 wrote: Or if you are interested I can remove the carousel and fit the Side mount tool changer instead??.

I have put quite a lot of effort into the carousel component and simulator....

Thank You for that.

It will be using the Home and Index routine... z up to tool change...carousel in, release/z-up/index new tool/z-down/clamp , carousel out and back to work...

Well hopefully I will get back to work on the machine shortly.
I have some new cannon sockets coming so I can adapt the new wiring to the old axis harnesses.

Its been miserable hot here also.. but it wont cool down until the end of September.

Well some time has passed to say the least :silly:

I'm getting to the point that I need to get the tool changer to work and now that I have some time of work I thought it would be a good opportunity to give it a go (again..)

I've studied Andys example and have gotten the gist of it but then I found out that my carousel "encoder" gives out a non-standard bcd code.. Meaning that's 1,2,4,8,10 and not 1,2,4,8,16 as I was expecting. It's also inverted as in high signal = 0.
And after that facepalm experience I started to make an Arduino PLC-like thing to control the toolchanger.
But then I got hung up on how to communicate what tool is requested (Linuxcnc > Arduino) and how to get Z to move when I wanted it to (Arduino > Linuxcnc)

Andy's post over at page 2 is almost easy enough for me to follow :pinch: But then the carousel position sensor screwed me and I was back to the beginning

Soo.. Is my Arduino plans just silly and should never have been done in the first place?
and where do I go from here?
I really appreciate all the help I can get

thewho wrote: I've studied Andys example and have gotten the gist of it but then I found out that my carousel "encoder" gives out a non-standard bcd code.. Meaning that's 1,2,4,8,10 and not 1,2,4,8,16 as I was expecting. It's also inverted as in high signal = 0.

Code:

1 = 1 1 1 1 0 2 = 1 1 1 0 1 3 = 1 1 1 0 0 ... 10 = 0 1 1 1 1 11 = 0 1 1 1 0 ... 15 = 0 1 0 1 0

Actually, that looks like 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 in binary Gray-code. The carousel component should be able to read that directly if you wire the in-not pins to the carousel inputs in Gray-code mode.

Did a search on gray code but i cant see the resemblance? It also says "BCD" on the carousel position sensor.

thewho wrote: Did a search on gray code but i cant see the resemblance? It also says "BCD" on the carousel position sensor.

Sorry, you are right. I miss-read the sequence.

It does look like BCD. BCD means that each digit of a decimal number is encoded as 4 bits.
0000 0001 == 1
0001 0000 == 10
1001 1001 == 99

You can do this in HAL, if you need to. Use two weighted-comps (one for each set of 4 bits) and add them together.

But, better would be to add BCD as an encoding to the carousel.comp file.

I am 200 miles away from my LinuxCNC machines over Christmas, but I will see if I can put something together today.

I'm truly amazed over the time you spend helping me and everyone else here on the formums

I'll poke around a bit more in your example and see if I learn something :whistle: