Putting the "Stop" back in "E-Stop"

I'm trying to get a physical E-stop button wired to my Gecko G540 to simultaneously trigger linuxCNC/gmoccapy's F1 software E-stop when I hit it, bringing everything software-side to the same screeching halt as the hardware.

I've gotten as far as making estop-ext track the state of the button - as confirmed by Hal Meter (yay), but I'm at a complete loss for how to make that show linuxcnc the proverbial big red stop sign.

I suspect this should be a fairly straightforward operation for anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the HAL (or at least I assume that's why a search hasn't turned up more discussion of it).... But I, unfortunately, am a bat of very little brain, who hasn't quite gotten beyond the idea that the "H" stands for "Headache" - so suggestions or resources with small words and simple concepts would be especially welcome.

Current .hal & .ini are attached - please let me know if there's any other info I can provide.


-Bats
(I'm still not sure about the "A" and "L" - although I have a feeling "artichokes" are in there somewhere)

I think you need to follow the stpes in the first post here
forum.linuxcnc.org/47-hal-examples/25861-external-e-stop

You know you can designate e-stop io points for the parallel port in Stepconfig and it will make the hal connections for you.

rodw wrote:

I think you need to follow the stpes in the first post here
forum.linuxcnc.org/47-hal-examples/25861-external-e-stop

Thanks. I'd seen that post before, but either lost track of it or wrote it off as inapplicable. It took a little fiddling (mostly due to leftover cruft from my prior attempts, I suspect), but I seem to have it working now.

Todd wrote:

You know you can designate e-stop io points for the parallel port in Stepconfig and it will make the hal connections for you.

That was my initial thought, but it only seemed to give me the pins, not the stopping behavior... unless I missed copying something over from the stepconf'd conf to my live conf (I've got an unstepconfable gantry that forced a fair bit of manual editing that a direct stepconf modify would've trodden all over).

Silly question, though... Hardware & HALs aside, is there a reason F1 only acts to engage the software E-stop, rather than both engaging and disengaging? It would make life easier if I could just [F1], [F2] after unlocking the hardware stop, rather than [pick up mouse & click], [F2].


In any case, thanks again for all the help - I think I'm roughly up and running now. Still a lot of minor tweaking (and some not-so-minor - I'd dearly love to mimic the Mach3 joypad plugin's jogging behavior), but I think I've got the fundamental roadblocks out of the way now, and can start trying to actually use the machine for a bit.

[edit: Oops... maybe not. Forgot about the spindle. Dammit. And probably three or four other things, too. Oh well.]


-Bats

Bats wrote:

I think I'm roughly up and running now. Still a lot of minor tweaking (and some not-so-minor - I'd dearly love to mimic the Mach3 joypad plugin's jogging behavior), but I think I've got the fundamental roadblocks out of the way now, and can start trying to actually use the machine for a bit.

[edit: Oops... maybe not. Forgot about the spindle. Dammit. And probably three or four other things, too. Oh well.]


-Bats

So you don't want me to tell you about this anymore?
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Simple_Remote_Pendant
Never tried it myself.

rodw wrote:

So you don't want me to tell you about this anymore?
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Simple_Remote_Pendant

Thanks - already had that one bookmarked as a starting point. I'm (not surprisingly) a little puzzled by how exactly it operates, though, since the description up top refers to proportional speed based on the stick (which is what made the Mach3 Joypad plugin such a joy so great to use), but later it looks like it's setting high/med/low speeds to be controlled by the buttons.

Either way, it's unfortunately being relegated to the back burner for the time being. Aside from the spindle taking precedence, I discovered that Debian can see the PS3 gamepad I'd been using with Mach3, but won't recognize any button/stick/trigger pressing/twiddling/twaddling - I'm at a loss for whether I could solve it with a new gamepad, or if it's a problem on the OS side (which I thought was supposed to support the PS3 controller natively).


-Bats