stepper driven turret with index and home switch

HI folks,

I am currently retrofitting an emco pc turn 50 lathe, it was missing it's electronics ( including the turret board). So far I have the axis, spindle control and feedback figured out. A few years back I configured a pc 5 turret but it had no position feedback or homing. 
My turret setup is comprised of the original "cheese wheel" with the two sensors, and a newly added stepper to drive the turret, the turret needs to move back to switch position and then run in reverse to lock against the ratchet. It has 6 positions. 

It seems to me that the carroussel comp should be able to drive it, though I've been warned by another user that the double trigger on the locking move could be an issue. 

I am unsure of how to link the carroussel comp into my hal file to the tool change routine, as well as how to setup the separate stepgen for the turret, and lastly, as I am already using the encoder pins of the mesa 7i96s for the spindle feedback, can. I use regular input pins to read the position? (case 'I" in the component I assume ).

thanks

 
 

Not quite sure what you mean by read position.
Did you want to read a low resolution quadrature encoder on the tool changer?
If so this is possible using regular inputs and the software encoder component.

Sorry for being unclear, it's just a disc with tab that runs trough a light sensor to tell the controller that it has reached a tool position, it's the same signal for each position but it has a separate light sensor for the home position, see picture attached

   
 

That's countable with the software encoder counter component
(provided it only goes one way since its not quadrature)

thanks, and how would I integrate it into the carroussel comp?

thank you very much , I'll try that out and start from here

so, I've added a third stepgen and compiled carousel.comp, and connected the suggested pins. I'm unsure how to get the carousel to output the signals to the step gens, and which pins to use (carousel motor fwd? jog fwd), as well as how to get the index and position input from the mesa board to the index of the carousel, I've attached my hal file, thanks for the help

One connection would be this:

net atc_velocity carousel.0.motor-vel  hm2_7i96s.0.stepgen.02.velocity-cmd

Also not sure if ther'es an appropriate enable signal for the ATC stepgen enable,
but for testing:

setp hm2_7i96s.0.stepgen.02.enable true