Electronics upgrade, wish to stay with Linuxcnc

Hey friends,
So it has been a very busy last few days. I bought 5 kl-5056 drives, and a 5 axis BOB. I had to build a new control box since the old one was not larger enough. So I
1. Built the box
2. installed the KL-5056's
3. Wasn't happy with paper work for new BOB, so re-used my old BOB a Probotix PBX-RF
4. rewired motors for parallel bipolar, they were unipolar with Probostep drives
5. I set my drives for 8x stepping as my old ones were, and I set them at 3.2v

Anyway, I have everything together and hooked up. I have not made any changes in LinuxCNC. It seems most things are responding, however all my axis's are going in reverse, and they are pretty slow in relation to the called for jog speed. For example my y axis may be traveling at 10in per minute when jog speed is at 200in per. Also, this was with the jog keys, when I try to home the machine it still goes all opposite directions.
One of the other reasons I went with the old BOB is because I can not figure out how to change pin assignments, inversion, or much of anything with my configuration of LinuxCNC. My version was setup by Probotix for their Galaxy machines. As sad as it may sound to you guys, my new BOB used pin 17 for the relay, and my setup uses it for the 4th axis. I could not figure out how to change it so I used the old board. haha
I know you like to see .hal and .ini setups, so I will figure out how to get them onto this computer and upload them...

Ok, so new development,

After doing a bit of reading, it seemed i could go into my ini file and change the limits to negative. So I did that, and it changed my directions to be correct. Then I went to home the machine, it slowly moved to home itself, and when the y hit both limit switches, it stopped, as if parked, however on Axis it slowed y moving in reverse and not homed, but when I tried to jog it I got an error because it was on the limit switch. Not wanting to mess with it anymore I hit the e-stop as usual, then as I was reaching for the power there was a pop, and visible flashes inside the control box, which I still have the top off of. So I jumped and killed power. (getting good at that, unfortunately.) Anyway, I could not figure out what went wrong, but then I saw it, on the PBX-RF there is a LM-317 logic supply regulator. Actually this on has two. well, the one for the driver side blew up. I did find pieces of it inside the new control box, but that's not to say it was not bad before.
FWIW I have 5v + supplying the step + and dir + on the drives, and pins control dir - and step -. I had read about some people hooking ground to dir - and step - and pins to control the positive side, however I could not find much on that, so I went with the directions on the drives.
So, that is where I am at right now. I do have an unused wall wart that supplies 5v dc 2.1A. What would you guys do given the circumstances? Should I disconnect the Power Supply from the BOB and some how use the wall wart. I believe were the PS hooks up to the BOB on the drive side goes through the LM-317, so hooking up a wall wart there would probably no longer work.
I know trying to use the new BOB, I would have to change some pin assignments, and I would either need to find a Par cable with one female and one male, or and adapter, because my old BOB is female DB25 and the new one is Male DB25.

Thanks a million,
Dave

Ok, maybe I am making headway, I don't know for sure.
I installed the new BOB. www.automationtechnologiesinc.com/produc...s-cnc-breakout-board
I put all the wiring pin to pin as my old BOB.
After much frustration, I learned from another forum that you need to supply 12v-24v dc in the "optional" +/- inputs. This was the only way to get the opto isolators to open up and allow my e-stop and other inputs to function.
Ok, I started LinuxCNC, everything appeared to function correctly, but still slow. I still had my "scale" as neg. to move axis's in correct direction. I homed the machine, it went to home and parked, but axis showed the Y axis moving away from the switches although the gantry was not moving, so I turned it all off. I then loaded the Probotix LinuxCNC configurator and ran the program for their Mondostep drivers, which are the same as KL-5056. I am not sure what all it changed but it changed the scale from my -800 to (not neg.) 1600. Not sure what else, but everything moves faster, all be it not as fast as it should.
So here is what I know, the machine is much quieter then with the unipolar drivers. But also with the slow acceleration and speed it appears week. with-out putting a neg. before the scale everything moves in the wrong direction. I am getting 38.9v from the PS to the drivers.

I should mention, I rewired my motors per www.probotix.com/wiki/index.php/Unipolar_to_BiPolar_Conversion for the upgrade from unipolar to bipolar
I have included my INI and Hal files. Also included will be the INI. and HAL after running the Probotix configurator for the mondostep drivers.
I did look at the files, and there is talk of inverting pins for dir. and step to work with "their" logic, etc. I almost think this is why everything is going in reverse, and maybe with "their" logic and scale set to negative it will not home correctly. Or maybe I am just an idiot, which is the conclusion I keep coming to.

Any help from you would be so much appreciated...

Ok, so this is what I have done since my last post;

I erased the block off lines around line 155 referencing inverting the direction signals. This got me going in the right direction. This change also fixed the homing issue I was having even with the neg. scale value.

I then determined I was moving at 1/2 scale.

I thought my original stepper drivers were 8th step, but the were 1/2 step, hence the 800 scale since my screws are 2 to 1.
Since Probotix changed it to 1600 in the Configurator , I changed my new drives to 1/4 step. This made my scale 1 to 1.

So right now I am running the Mondo INI and HAL, minus the lines about inverted direction. and 1/4 stepping with 2 to 1 screws and 1600 scale.

The machine homes, moves as it should, etc. It is ALOT quieter then it was before with the Unipolar Probostep Drivers. I mean like the drives were almost louder then my router, now I can hardly hear them. Don;t know if that is good or not. So I shut it down for the night. As with past attempts, I am waiting for that fire cracker to go off again in the control box, and I am still not comfortable with the machine. I am very nervous it will pop again. I guess there is only one way to find out right?

Unless you recommend otherwise, given my history here (please feel free to also give me the go ahead if you read this and think I'm on the right path) tomorrow I will run a few small programs and see how it does, and if that works I will put it back into production.

So it seems to be working pretty good. I had one error while running my first program, as the machine was running it said:

RTAPI: ERROR: unexpected realtime delay on task 1
This message will only display once per session. run the latency test and resolve before continuing.

The rest of the day it has not come up again, and I have shut down and restarted several times as I moved cords and the control box back to it's actual spot in the shop.

Also, I will have to do some more reading. My setup used to move to x0y0 when I selected "return to home" and now no matter what it moves to the front left corner.

Also, if I have a program file loaded, and changed my x0y0 location, the file would automatically reposition the view in axis to match, now if I change x0y0 I have to reload the file. When the error appeared, I don;t know it if matters, but the tool location on axis was not cutting in the same area as the preview since I have change 0's and not reloaded the file. Maybe LinuxCNC recognized they were not lined up and considered it missed steps.

lastly, and maybe this is normal with the new set-up, bipolar and all, but after any motor stops, after about 1 second there is a faint "tick" sound from the motor.

Other then that, things are so far good. Thank you so much for the help so far...I could not have done it with-out you

Dave

My bad, did not notice the "return to xy origin" button. That works from that part. it has been a month, I guess I forgot a few things.