New to MESA

Howdy all

Real happy today, I just finished ordering my Mesa Plug-N-Go kit from BigJohnT! Thanks JT for a straight forward purchase, looking forward to receiving the cards.

Now, I will be replacing a PMDX-126 with the 7i76 and I currently have NPN NO proxy sensors on the machine. I use these through a set of relays so all 4 of them trip the same input on the BOB. As these are using relays inbetween the sensors and BOB can I stick with them or should I replace them with PNP NO proxies?

I already have a dedicated 5V power supply for the 7i76 as well as a dedicated 24V supply for field power, I'll just need to make up a DB25M to DB25M cable to get the input of the 7i76 outside of my control box.

For my software I am using PathPilot so what would be the best way to get the cards and the machine talking together, by using Tormachs files and adjusting them for my inputs & outputs or should I install 2.7 somewhere are use that to generate my hal and ini files?

Really looking forward to using all the pushbuttons on my machine and getting some flashing LED happening for "messaging"

Your NPN sensors are fine. You just need to add a 2.2k 1 W pullup resistor between the signal wire and 24V (I'm using 1/2 W and its fine.) I bought the wrong ones and got some advice from PCW here on the forum about this and they are working fine on my 7i76e.

Thanks Rod

Between me posting and your answer I bought some PNP proxies on ebay.

Here a shot of the little relay board that triggers the BOB, 3 of the 4 proxies are connected at the moment, the 4th is the Z which I haven't done yet (still not done 2 years after I built this thing!)



Here too are my on machine control boxes. The one with the black button is on the Y car, the black button being for Z touch off. Both have Start, Pause, Stop buttons on them that I want to connect to Pathpilot. Both also have the one big LED that I want to flash differently for different machine status. The small LED is to show which out of the 3 E-stops have been pressed. Currently both are on in the second shot because the machine is in E-stop at the moment.





Cheers

I've done a bit with flashing lights and Todd helped me enormously. See this post on my build thread
forum.linuxcnc.org/show-your-stuff/32029...build?start=20#85378

MAke sure you follow the link to Todds solution

You could probably eliminate the relay board. There is less to go wrong if the Prox output goes straight to the 7i76.

I probably will do that this time. I used the relays to circumvent the lack of inputs on my current BOB. With the 7i76 I have heaps more of them!