Trouble with dual motor gantry setup

Thanks for the advice, and will probably go that way. The construction of your system is similar and you are correct, we could easily implement something similar.

One advantage of the current sensor setup is that if something screws up, ether one motor stopping causing severe racking, or something is on the rails causing the X-Axis to lift, it triggers a limit, which is nice.

We have a lot going on at the moment, but I will probably take you up on that Mesa offer. We would like to install on a small Lenovo thinkcentre that will fit in the control cabinet, but has no slots, so an ethernet connection would solve that (or allow us to install elsewhere with easy cabling).

Also have some safety concerns about the system and would like to put as many safety interlocks as possible, given the use by not so experienced users.

We currently limit the X speed as that is an exposed area and is driven by dual Nema 34 at 5.6 amps, so can move at a frightening speed considering the mass of the gantry.

As part of this SW upgrade we are also replacing the spindle, which has suffered too many crashes and main bearing are a bit sad. The new one has an ATC so we need to drive all the pneumatics for that as well.

Currently running off an old PC that has 2 parallel ports, but that is for testing only.

Add to that we are moving premesis in a couple of weeks time. Not looking forward to that.

Fun local fact: this is an Australian CNC that the previous owner used to make surfboard blanks (how very Australian )

Thanks tommy will try that today. Lots of work, so little time ...

Rod, what is the cost of the Mesa card

Ok got this working. I realised that the files I gave you were the ones in the middle of me testing.

The problem ended up being an IO Error (as in Idiot Operator). At the start of the linuxcnc change we decided to fix an issue of the previous setup, in that the longest axis was Y, not X, which is not particularly intuitive. I switched this round every where in the hal/ini files but forgot the wiring diagram from before still had the old parallel port pin setup.

Therefore it was hitting the X-Limit when trying to home Y

All homing seems to work Ok now, thanks for all the help.

Am now moving on to the vfd using the hy_vfd over modbus.

All the comms seem to work ok but when the spindle starts to spin I get joint limit errors on all 3 joints
I have look at halshow and dont see anything strange. What I have done is to disable the pwmgen stuff in the main hal and added the attached custom.hal.

Will research it tonight but thought I would post this to be sure that I am not doing something stupid

yeah that makes a lot of sense. Will check it today.

Found the problem. it was an earthing problem between the probe and the DIN relays. They were not using the same earth as the PDMX BOB. Surprised they worked at all.

Now to get tool touchoff to work.


Thanks for the help guys.