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Yeah, somehow i managed to miss this.
When in doubt, more C4 !!!
Use relays as you have in the drawing for ARCOK, do not wire anything to Mesa, do a test cut and check if the relay closes while cutting. Do the same thing for TorchON but reversed, meaning contacts go to plasma and coil on the Mesa side but do not wire to Mesa just use whatever can give 15-24V and trigger the relay with it see if the torch fires. After this, you can wire stuff to Mesa, one at a time, test, wire, test....
As for the Arc Voltage, find the big rectifiers, usually with big aluminium heatsinks and find the positive and negative, wire two short wires to each, wire 2 of 1MOhm/2W resistors to each of those wires, on the other side of the resistors wire two thinner wires prefferably shielded and send those to Mesa THCAD, mind the polarity, although nothing will happen if you do mix the polarity but you will have no voltage reading on screen.
Make positively and ultimately sure you have the power cord and plug under your foot while adding this, i do that always to prevent someone somehow getting the idea that it belongs plugged to the wall...while i have both hands inside!

There is a wire between the torch- and the old thc's interface. I think the interface has resistors and they sampled the work+ side at the thc. But i'm guessing and there's no useful documentation for it. There is a spot on the old interface for divided arc volts, but it was never hooked up. 

So I have to do at least a little wiring inside either way, so I was thinking may as well put the thcad inside the plasma while I'm at it. 
It's a high frequency machine so maybe that'll help with emi.



 

I am trying to figure out how to interface a thcad2 and mesa 7i97t with a hypertherm hsd130.
Originally, this machine was hooked up to an external hypertherm thc.
The hsd130 has an internal 37 pin connector that goes to a "phc interface" that has am external 15 pin connector that connected to the old thc.
Unfortunately, the phc interface's manual doesn't explain what the pins on the 15 pin connector are for or how they should be wired and the hsd130 manual doesn't even mention it.
The manual does have all the information for the internal 37 pin connector. 

 Should I just remove the phc 15 pin connector and use the 37 pin? That seems easier than trying to reverse engineer the "phc interface"?

I will try to attach the relevant pages from the manual.

The example circuits are above my head.
Do I need any relays for the arc ok and start i/o's or can they connected directly to the 7i97t?
Should I use 24v from my controllers power supply?
Can I use 2 or 3 1mohm resisters connected directly to the torch/work leads for the thcad2?

 Hello everyone,This is my first post here on the LinuxCNC forum, and also my very first CNC build — so please forgive any mistakes or lack of experience on my part. I'm doing my best to learn as I go.I'm building a plasma CNC machine and using a Mesa 7i92 card. For my setup, I’ll be connecting two 5-axis breakout boards — one on P1 and one on P2. I’m looking for a suitable firmware that would allow me to:

• Use 4 or 5 encoder inputs (for THCAD and potentially other uses)
• Have at least 10 inputs and 5 outputs for general machine control

I’ve checked the Mesa site and the firmware list, but I’m not sure which bitfile would suit this configuration best. If anyone has a firmware file that fits these needs — or could point me in the right direction — I would be very grateful.Thank you so much in advance for your help and patience. I really appreciate the knowledge and support shared in this community.Best regards,

Hello All, I'm using this post processor (PlasmaCv2.1) in Fusion 360. My issue is that my first round hole in the gcode cuts no problem, machine come downs and probes, makes a perfect cut and then the Z axis rises 1-2inches and continues along the path in the gcode but doesn't come back down to start the plasma arc, it just runs the whole program without coming back down to initiate arc and cut the material. I don't get an "arc okay" error which is odd .I went back into Fusion360 and set my retract height and clearance height to 0 to see if that would help and maybe the THC via THCAD through a MESA 7i76 board would work but it just gave me an error. "Safe Traverse Height has been reduced to 0.23in"


Images attached of my cut parameters ,material properties , gcode from Fusion 360 and some misc info. 

The machine cuts simple parts using the conversational in QTplasmaC no problem, and my THC works so I've isolated it to the Fusion 360 Gcode and unsure how to fix my issue. Possible bug maybe?

I feel like I'm doing something really dumb and overlooking something really simple, in an effort to not waste another couple days going in circles, could anyone point me in the right direction, i greatly appreciate it!