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Haha, you are in luck that someone bothered to print information on that thing.

I would 

• provided nothing damaged on the machine, not touch its electrics. 
• get it running without integrating the spindle into the control. (safe that machine configuration)
• start working on spindle integration with another machine configuration (that way you can take your time to figure it out and still use the machine to cut something)

Did you do your latency test? Keep in mind: Should you have to replace the PC, a PCI or PCIe parallelport card is a means to provide a parallelport for cheap. No need to hunt down a PC with onboard parallel port.

Chances are that you can drive the VFD via PWM directly. (maybe a digital potentiometer is an easy way to do) A 2nd parallel port can be added if there is not enough IO left for the VFD.

 

It's almost a year and a half later. Has anyone updated the probe-screen-ng to Python3 and LinuxCNC 2.9._ ?

It mentions a filename vartokins.py, I don't have that here so I don't know what that is.

There are probably several things. But let's start with the line
"loadusr -W ./lcec_conf ethercat-conf.xml'"
Remove the ./ and it will find the lcec_conf module at /usr/lib/linuxcnc/modules/lcec_conf.so
The filename ethercat-conf.xml on that line must match the file name where you have the config. You attach ethercat-conf_2025-02-26.xml.  If that's the one you use use the line "loadusr -W lcec_conf ethercat-conf_2025_02_26.xml".
You will get error because slave 0 and 2 do not have hal pins with the mentioned names. You had them as basic cia402 in the earlier xml file. Either go back to that or change the pin name in ethercat-conf.xml the "halPin" value there.
There is no slave 3 in ethercat-conf.xml so you will get errors when trying to use lcec.0.3.out-03 in the hal file.
 

Chris,

With ChatGPT's help I think I have found enough examples to have a go at this. I'll report back with how it goes. Thanks for your guidance.

John

Hello, 
i have a delta VFD-H, i have checked the manual there is no mention of modbus, only Serial Communications rs485 is mentioned, can i still use it with linuxcnc over rs485 ?
 

Thanks for that. I had a little formatting issue with my post that I corrected.

However, since I don't have enough inputs with the parallel port type setup to put the fault line from each driver to its own input, all three will be going to a single input. This will be corrected once I get a Mesa 7C81 if they ever go back into stock.

So, for my current setup I could do this:

net driver-fault <= hal_gpio.GPIO25-in
net driver-fault =>joint.0.amp-fault-in

Which would trigger a x-axis driver fault no matter which driver actually had a fault and stop all motion. Is this correct?

Incidentally, for my own education is this line the same as the above two lines except just on a single line?

net driver-fault => joint.0.amp-fault-in <= hal_gpio.GPIO25-in

Thanks.

Looks like that should be relatively easy to get working
with a parallel port and LinuxCNC + StepConf since
it was designed for a standard parallel port interface.

What issues did you have?

Hakan, This appears exactly as the issue I am having. I can say that I also have linuxcnc-ethercat installed from the repo. Also I would have just posted here if I knew his error was the same, sorry for clogging things up.

Steve Cap

Thank you for all the help so far. I've been running into an issue and feared it may have been caused by my fumbling earlier on and some weird state I may have put the installation into. To resolve this, I started a fresh install from current ISO and so far it has been much smoother given that I have a little more understanding. However, I have still ended up getting stuck at the same place, lol. I have included a screenshot and some config files to assist troubleshooting. 

Thanks, 

Steve Cap 

joint.N.amp-fault-in IN BITShould be driven TRUE if an external fault is detected with the amplifier for this joint.

Hmmm... Can't figure out how to edit a post. Here's an image of the controller

Hi all. I am trying to figure out the last step of configuring my machine. For background, I am using a Raspberry Pi 4b with the current LinuxCNC image from the downloads section. The RPi is connected to a Byte2Bot parallel hat which is in turn connected to a parallel port breakout board. I have managed to figure out all of the step, direction, and limit switch stuff and now have a machine that moves, homes, etc.

The final thing I want to do is define an input to LinuxCNC to stop motion if one of my closed loop stepper motors throws a fault. Essentially like hitting the E-stop. The stepper drivers each have a fault output pin and all of these fault outputs from the drives are wired to parallel port pin 10 of the BOB. This should be GPIO 25 (GPIO connector pin 22). For everything else I have done I have used templates and just been able to change pin numbers. I believe the hal entries would look something like this:

net driver-fault <= hal_gpio.GPIO25-in
net driver-fault => iocontrol.0.emc-enable-in

I believe this would result in a stepper driver fault essentially tripping the emergency stop.  I don't have a way to test this right at the moment and was wondering if someone could take a look and see if my thinking is correct?

Thanks,

John B 

Greetings.

I'm new to linuxCNC (and CNC in general). I've been "gifted" a Stinger CNC after the owner upgraded to a newer machine because he was having problems with the software on this one. It came with an OLD tower PC running WinXP and WinCNC. This was connected via parallel port to another box that housed the controller and other electronics like the emergency shutoff switch, etc.  The controller it uses is a Testra 4x483Q.  I've purchased a mini-pc with a parallel port and loaded linuxCNC on it. I've begun trying to get it configured to talk to the controller but it's not natively compatible and it's been giving me some issues. Frankly, I'd just as soon put new controllers into the box that are natively supported by LinuxCNC but before I go spending hundreds of dollars on what would be a stab in the dark for me, I thought I'd ask for some advice.  Oh, I've also purchased a 3-phase, 220V (chinesium) spindle with an H100-series "High Performance Vector Control Inverter" to replace the router it came with so I'd like/need to be able to control that as well.  Any help or advice you can offer will be appreciated. Do I keep fighting with getting the old controller to talk to LinuxCNC or do I get a new set of controllers, power supplies, etc that are known to work with LinuxCNC and build it back up myself (and hopefully learn something along the way?). Recommendations for controllers and power supplies would be great.

Thanks!

Thanks PCW.

At the moment all that’s in the kernel command line is quiet
I had previously tried to add an isolcpus=2, 3 using grub-Customizer but it messed up somehow and was forcing it to boot into tty which took a little time to work out and resolve.
I will add the power management in the file manually tomorrow and see if that resolves it. The pings are all low but as you say something must happen that causes some latency every so often