Getting a WHB04B-4 working.

tommylight wrote:

Use gedit or mousepad or xed or geany for editing on linux, nothing else will do as they will insert line breaks and other stuff.
Notepad or Notepad++ for windows.
No word processors.

Oh yeah, I think though I did this on a Mac with the text editor app set to plain text, but I wonder if it kept some stuff when I copied/pasted the example. Anyway, with that discovered, I've ripped it all out and put it back in a bit at a time by typing it out in nano through SSH. That's been good as it gave me a chance to get more familiar with what it's doing than I would if I were just slapping in a copy and fixing errors.

So it looks like it's good to go, Jogging is working, I've integrated the control signals into the rest of my existing nets and got the stuff it provides through it's internal halui pins hooked up. Just need to work on the buttons and I'll be back to where I was prior. I'm going to buy 2 or 3 more over the next few months to keep as spares.

Thanks everyone for the help!

To kind of wrap up what I really needed minus the config file having bad characters:

1.) Obtained a copy of Debian stretch with LinuxCNC 2.7 pre-installed and installed it on PC.
2.) Verified that the initial install created user was in dialout group
3.) Used package manager to remove the 2.7 packages, and added and selected the 2.8 repos decribed here .
4.) Created the file 99-xhc-whb04b-6.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d with the single line (if you don't already have one covering it):5.) Created the file xhc-whb04b-6.hal with the sample config from here and edited that to suit my machine (ie Start linuxCNC and see what error it reports )

Note that you need those whb.halui mode pins, both the status and the control, hooked up for it to behave right. That took me some work as they were already claimed for PYVCP panel in places. Had to add some logic in to integrate them with the pendant too.

Otherwise you'll get weird behavior where the jogging only works when you click your heels three times, type an MDI command, and switch back to manual via the Axis GUI tab. It's obviously got internal state that has to be kept in sync with the application. I'm guessing it's best to hook up all the control signals even if they aren't in use in your implementation.

Hopefully this helps the next poor schlub that has his old HB04 die on him!

andypugh wrote:

A common cause of wierd HAL errors is that if you copy and paste HAL from the web you end up with em-dash rather than minus as the - character. And that doesn't work in HAL files.

Yes that has caught me out more than once and it's hard to spot .

andypugh wrote:

A common cause of wierd HAL errors is that if you copy and paste HAL from the web you end up with em-dash rather than minus as the - character. And that doesn't work in HAL files.

Good catch... I'll bet that was almost certainly it.

Hi photomankc, I have been trying to get my xhc-whb04b-4 working also for the last 3 months, I finally gave up but I was wondering if you could send me a copy of your Hal and INI files for this pendent. I would really appreciate it.
Thanks Mike