Charge Pump (or Watchdog?) turns off when idle

So this is a new one. I recently upgraded from PathPilot 1.9 to 2.0 which is linuxcnc 2.8 I believe.

Everything seems to be working fine, but if I leave my mill for a while, the charge pump turns off, and I have to restart pathpilot to reactivate it. Previously in 1.9 the charge pump would stay active indefinitely.

BTW - using 5i25 mesa board, w/ a Novakon Breakout board. And the firmware only has stepgen's so I am using stepgen to drive the charge pump.

The relevant watchdog and charge pump code is here:


# 5i25 watchdog timeout
# 10 milliseconds (~10 times the servo loop period)

setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.watchdog.timeout_ns 10000000

# Charge pump
# pin set by 5i25 configuration
# P3 pin 17 gpio 007
# ---Chargepump StepGen: 0.25 velocity = 10Khz square wave output---

setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.dirsetup 100
setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.dirhold 100
setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.steplen 50000
setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.stepspace 500
setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.position-scale 1
setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.step_type 0
setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.control-type 1
setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.maxaccel 0
setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.maxvel 11000
setp hm2_[HOSTMOT2](BOARD).0.stepgen.06.velocity-cmd 10000

Thanks in advance.

It may be that the screensaver or some other function on your PC cause latency greater
than the 10 ms watchdog timeout period when idle for a long time

I would disable any power saving features that slow/halt the CPU when idle
You could also increase the WD timeout as a diagnostic

Thanks Peter! I just poked around to see if there were any power saving features, but it looks like everything is natively off in that regard.

I increased the watchdog timeout as you suggested, to 500 ms which is 50x longer than before. We'll see what happens.