Bridgeport Series 1 Anilam GXM retrofit

My Anilam control has seen better days and its time to replace it.

After quite a bit of research I've settled on EMC with a Mesa 5i25-7177 combo. I've already received the boards from Mesa and have been reading up on EMC so as to understand what I need to to to complete the retrofit.

The retrofit should be straight forward and I believe I've identified all of the interfaces that I need to connect to:
X,Y,Z Servo Drives +-10v servo dynamics
relay to power the servos
relay to turn on the spindle
estop switch
glass scales for X and y
rotary encoder for Z
limit switches for X,Y and Z
Am I missing anything here???

Being a newb to EMC, its a steep learning curve and I've already hit some snags which I'll try to document.

Eager to get started, I burned the live CD and booted my PC and completed the installation without any issues.

Next I installed the 5i25 and hooked up the 7i77 board and booted the machine.

Since the machine is next to the Bridgeport, I thought it would be easier to sit in the office and use VNC to connect to the CNC's PC while I'm learning. This is when I hit my first snag.

I got VNC setup easily and was able to log in from my laptop but when I started EMC, it would error out with:
X Error of failed request: BadWIndow (invalid WIndow Parameter) blah blah blah

I did some research and thoguht it may be related to the NVidia video driver, monkeyed around with different version, ho joy

Then I thought to try running EMC on the CNC PC and, voila, no error. Perhaps it has something to do with VNC. SO for now I'll just work on the machine directly.

Moving on to the next issue... EMC still wouldn't start up and EMC2 Errors window complained about a problem with my ha; file :

hm2-servo7i77.hal:211: Pin 'hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-00' does not exist

The offending line in my hal file is as follows:
net home-switch <= hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.7i77.0.0.input-00

Not sure what this error means but if I comment out this line in my hal file, EMC finally comes up.

Next challenge...

Although EMC came up without going to the EMC2 Errors window , theres an error message in the bottom right corner which suggests I look at my dlog message where I find:


[ 51.657057] In recent history there were
[ 51.657058] 2804403, 2826089, 2792342, 3016601, and 2573116
[ 51.657060] elapsed clocks between calls to the motion controller.
[ 51.657065] This time, there were 3208744 which is so anomalously
[ 51.657067] large that it probably signifies a problem with your
[ 51.657068] realtime configuration. For the rest of this run of
[ 51.657070] EMC, this message will be suppressed.
[ 51.657071]

This had me stumped for a bit and then I remembered reading an earlier post about 5i25 supplied 5V power for a 7i76 installation. Took a look at my 7i77 and it was jumpered to user the 5i25 cable supplied power. But when I looked at the 5i25 jumper (W1) I found that it was configured "breakout power disabled". In my haste to get the boards installed, I didn't take the time to adequately review the documentation.

Set the jumper to supply power, reinstalled in my PC, power up and ran EMC. No more complaints about elapsed clock anomalies.

I was hopeful that this may also have been the source of my earlier hal file problem, i.e. "Pin 'hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-00' does not exist" but it doesn't fix this.

It would probably be a good idea to explain what configuration you are using and how you set ti up.

Rick G

If you do not get the field I/O to work on the 7I77
( and hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-00 is part of the field I/O)
it most likely means you do not have field power connected.
This is the 10 to 32V power for the isolated I/O section of the 7I77

To get this to work, connect field power to TB2:
TB2 pin 1 to +12/24V
TB2 pin 8 to 12/24V common

PCW gets the gold star

Hooked up a 12vdc power source to TB2 as you suggested, powered up my PC, uncommented out that one line in my hal file and started EMC, no errors. Plus "halcmd show pin" shows the field pins, configurations and values:

10 bit OUT FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-00 ==> home-switch
10 bit OUT TRUE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-00-not
10 bit OUT FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-01
10 bit OUT TRUE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-01-not
10 bit OUT FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-02
10 bit OUT TRUE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-02-not
....
10 bit OUT FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-29
10 bit OUT TRUE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-29-not
10 bit OUT FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-30
10 bit OUT TRUE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-30-not
10 bit OUT FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-31
10 bit OUT TRUE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.input-31-not
...
10 bit IN FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.output-00
10 bit IN FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.output-01
10 bit IN FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.output-02
10 bit IN FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.output-03
....
10 bit IN FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.output-14
10 bit IN FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.output-15
10 bit IN FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.spindir
10 bit IN FALSE hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.spinena
10 float IN 0 hm2_5i25.0.7i77.0.0.spinout


This connection isn't really clear from the docs that its required. I would have thought that the 5125 firmware would know that these field IO pins are available since they circuits are on the "far" side of the opto-isolation.

So to recap, the challenges that I've run into are:

1) VNC (remote access) doesn't seem to work out of the box
2) Need to properly configure the 7i77 for logic 5V (proper power will light the CR1 LED which is in the upper left hand corner just about TB1 connector)
Either use the power supplied by the 5i25 which requires:
- the 5i25 W1 jumper to be in the "up" position (away from the PCI connector)
- the 7i77 W5 pin must be in the left position ( when the db25 connector is at your 9-oclock)
Or use external 5V power:
- the 5i25 W1 jumper to be in the "down" position (away from the PCI connector)
- the 7i77 W5 pin must be in the right position ( when the db25 connector is at your 9-oclock)
- 5Vdc connected to TB1
3) Need to properly configure the 7i77's field logic power (and I suppose you should also have correct field power too)
Either use the field power: The field power drives a voltage regulation circuit which can drive the field logic power supply
-Connect a power supply between 8 and 32v (I'm assuming VDC) to TD2 pin 1 (8 to 32) and pin 8 (vGND)
- Jumper W1 (at your 1-oclock with the DB25 connector at your 9-oclock) in the left hand position
This effectively connects pin 1 and pin 5 of TB2 connector together
Or use a separate power supply to only drive the field IO logic power:
-Connect a power supply between 8 and 32v (I'm assuming VDC) to TD2 pin 1 (8 to 32) and pin 8 (vGND)
Without this power connection, EMC will be happy but the devices that you are attempting to drive with the field power won't get any
- Jumper W1 (at your 1-oclock with the DB25 connector at your 9-oclock) in the right hand position
-Connect a power supply between 8 and 32v (I'm assuming VDC) to TD2 pin 5 (8 to 32) and pin 8 (vGND)
This just drives the field logic power through the on-board voltage regulator

Actually its pretty clear, here's from page 14 of the 7I77 manual:

"VIN power must be present for the 7I77 field I/O to be detected and operate."

Note that the 5I25 firmware knows _nothing_ about any of the remote I/O including the analog outputs (if you unplug the whole 7I77 from the 5I25 or have it powered down it will not find the
analog outputs either)

As another illustration of how this works, the 7I77 has a spare RS-422 port for an additional sserial remote I/O device. There is no way the 5I25 can know what may be connected here, but if any sserial remote device is connected here, its I/O will show up automatically as hal pins/parameters.