Koike Aronson Plasma Conversion - sanity check on Mesa board selection?

Hi all, 

Looking to help a friend do the same thing as this thread, but with a 7i97T for the servos and a 7i78 card for the stepper for Z and THCAD2 for Arc Voltage. 
I could use some help reviewing the hal and ini files to see if I'm on the right track.  I built a stepper machine before with a 7i96s and THCAD2, so have some experience with the setup using PNCCONF.  This is my first attempt at editing the ini and hal files directly.  I combined the basic 7i97 file, with the JT's configurator tool, and the plasma specific info from my 7i96s config.    My main question is how to correctly identify the board names in the files.  In the ini file it shows 7i97T as the board and 7i78 as the card, but I don't see how the 7i78 board gets translated to the hal file?  Ignore the scales, drive values, and pin assignments for most of the signals for now. 

Also, the servos are Cleveland Motion Controls p/n MTE3528-508BG, does anyone know how to determine the encoder scale on these?  May just have to measure it once the system is configured.  

Thanks for the reply, I'll make those changes.  Most of the values are just placeholders for now, trying to get the overall structure of the files right and then will populate the specific values.   The machine is the same one as in this post, it has a servos on X and Y and a smart stepper motor from Animatics on the Z, which we may replace with a simple stepper driven by a TB6600 stepper motor driver.  The servo drives are from Advanced Motion Controls (BE15A8) www.a-m-c.com/product/be15a8/ and the drives are from Cleveland Motion Control MTE3528-508BG.   Also, thanks for posting the servo tuning link. I read through it a few times already and will definitely follow that when we get to that point.   In the files, how can I confirm that the stepper driver is getting assigned to the 7i78 vs the 7i97T?

If the DC motor still has the original encoder, then its 5V differential with 500ppr.

How does scale come into play for velocity mode servos?  I see multiple different Scale callouts between the .ini and the Hal files.

From JT's configurator tool, in the .ini there are these values which I currently have defined as:
Scale for drives = 10
Analog Scale Max = 10
Analog Min Limit = -10
Analog Max Limit = 10
Encoder Scale = -634.92 (this one I understand, although might need a double check on the value. Calculated based on 500 ppr with .7875" in per rev of servo)

In the main.hal file, I only see this line referencing SCALE, which I assume to be the scale for drives listed above.  
setp hm2_7i97T.0.pwmgen.00.scale [JOINT_0] SCALE

I also have seen Output Scale referenced in other posts, is this the same as Analog Scale Max?

I set the PWM frequency to 75000 and enabled dither.

Thanks for the help

For analog velocity mode servos you can leave the scale at the default value/range (+-10V)
or you can set it so that the PID settings are all in engineering units. To do this, you set
the scale/range to the velocity in machine units per second your axis move at 10V.
This means that  now the PID output is scaled directly in velocity. This also means the FF1
value is known (1.00)

Thanks, that makes sense to me.  I think for now it makes sense to keep the PID values in voltage.  However, I'm still confused on the difference between Scale and Analog Scale Max.  Should the number be 10 for both if the PID is in voltage rather than velocity.

You would need to look at the hal and ini files to see how those constants are used
(some may not even be used, as there's normally a lot of "boilerplate" in hal/ini files)