C6 spindle control board with Hobby CNC Pro

I do see a change in voltage at pin 16. It shows 1.427 V at M3 & .06 V at M5. When inverted, it's just the opposite.

I got a message from the CNC4PC group. Arturo says that he C6 board requires a buffered signal, & won't work with the HCNC board as the pins are straight through. Perhaps the C6 is fine after all. The C10 that I ordered has buffered signals & should be here tomorrow.

JR

That makes some sense.

We have seen similar problems with 3.3v parports before.
Although the peak voltage is lower than a 5v parport, the TTL thresholds are pretty similar.

Anything between approx 0.8v and 2v (off the top of my head) is in a grey area and is not recognised as a ON signal whilst not being OFF either

Hopefully the buffered BOB will do it

regards

OK, I got the C10 all connected. I look as though everything is connected when I watch the pins & stepgen in HAL, except the stepgen.dir isn't changing. I'm only getting .27 V when I check the output of the C10. There has to be a problem somewhere in my HAL configuration, but I'm getting crosseyed looking for it. Any clues?

Hi

I look as though everything is connected when I watch the pins & stepgen in HAL, except the stepgen.dir isn't changing

I am a bit confused, when I looked at the docs for the X2 spindle controller, I am sure I read that it only runs in one direction, there is no direction control.
So the stepgen.3.dir pin, which would normally be used to activate the relay on the speed board, to change direction, is irrelevant is it not?

There is nothing obvious in the hal file, unless of course any of the pins need inverting because the logic has been reversed by buffering.
Other than the fact that I use stepgen.4 so as to leave room for an A axis and specifically (and should be needlessly) declare AXES=5 in the ini file
it looks just like the one for my small XJ20 mill (about the size of a X3)

It is extremely difficult to diagnose from a distance, I think I personally would be tempted at this point to do a complete swap of axes to eliminate a lot in one go

With everything disconnected and powered down, connect the step/dir/gnd from a known good axis to the speed board and run that axis at increasing speed on continuous jog
Does the spindle rotate?

You can do the same the other way around to see if the speed board step/dir/gnd spins a stepper like a motor

You won't get good movement and will undoubtably get a following error for the axis connections, but in a quick and dirty way will be able to eliminate a huge number of factors,
if for instance the spindle rotates, but the axis does not.

HEALTH WARNING
If you do go this path, be VERY carefull to remove power and preferably ground the power line before breaking and making connections.
Also triple check polarity of connections etc before powering up again.
Stepper drivers don't have much of a sense of humour where those things are concerned.

regards

I'm only getting .27 V when I check the output of the C10.

Nor sure where you took this measurement, could you explain where the reading was taken and what you were doing and what you expected?
Did inverting the signal make a difference?

Rick G

I was taking the reading on the C6 header where the step, & ground wires that come from the C10 are connected.
How exactly do I invert pin 16? I've tried with this:


setp parport.1.pin-16-out-invert

I forgot to add that I was expecting somewhere around 2 volts at the point where the header connecting the output from the C10 & the input to the C6. I've read that in the CNC4PC forums.

You are right about the dir pin. I used the modifications to HAL in EMC file from the CNC4PC website as a startiong point for my modifications.
I'm very reluctant to connect anything to the Seig spindle controller until I can verify that the correct voltage(7 Volts) is being output from the C6.
I'm always very careful when connecting/disconnecting anything in regards to this system. Everythisng is always powered down & allowed to sit foar a bit before messing with the connections. In the case for the HCNCcontroller, I wait until the fan has completely stopped before making/breaking any connections. It has a 24 volt fan that runs for a while as the filter capacitors drain down. I found out the hard way what happens when a stepper is disconnected prematurely.

You might want to try this to get a handle on what is going on with the parallel port and the c10...
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Parallel_Port_Tester
You can toggle pins 14 and 16 and see a result at the c10.

Have you tried inverting parallel port pin 14 as well as 16?

I am assuming pin 14 turns the spindle on and pin 16 is used for the step signal.
Again with hal watch follow the signals for the stepgen and spindle through to the parallel port hal pins and you can test pin 14 with a meter at the c10.

Rick G