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Thank you.  Here they are.

Files?

When I us the A axis jog it does move the "cone" A axis.  It only goes from 0 to -6 which looks like the settings for the Z axis in inches instead of degrees.
Getting there, appreciate your help.  Almost there.

Thanks

@DauntlessA
Its not necessary (or desirable) for the TP to command the motor. Instead, another real time component would read the heading and command the tangential knife motor. The strength of Linuxcnc is its modular design so don't break that.
When you see how fast Linuxcnc can respond and move position on a plasma cutter, I don't think it would be an issue to keep up with the knife.

Some very good ideas too. I had thought about tilting the torch as you suggest. This is simple if you take a line perpendicular to the heading (eg the line from the current position to the centre of the arc) to set torch orientation and another motor to tilt the torch your 10-15 degrees
Some of the underlying true hole technology shared with me is also built into Monokrom GUI written by James Walker (JoCo) who was the only one interested in implementing it. github.com/kcjengr/monokrom
It uses a Gcode filter to remove all holes and replaces it with our "true hole" database driven methodology
I describe the methodology here 

I think the only other pin required would be the heading from the centre of the arc to (or from) the current position.

 

Grotius, all your work on s-curve and the clothoid path smoothing is absolutely amazing, thanks so much for doing all this! Really exciting to see these features in an open-source controller.

Regarding the tangential knife angle, instead of just having the data as a hal pin, is it also possible to have the motion planner command a rotary joint/axis to complete this motion?

The problem with using the hal pin to control a rotary axis is that the motion won't be smoothly blended, and the rotary axis will have to accelerate fast to avoid significant deviation since (unless cutting a straight line), it's essentially always playing catch-up to the position where it should be.

So, to implement this, it would mean calculating the tangential knife angles when the clothoid is calculated and adding these rotary joint moves to the queue? And then when loading the motion planner, specifying which joint is to be used in this manner?

I understand this could get complicated if you do also want the rotary axis to be controllable by the operator/G-Code as well, in which case the tangential knife angle could maybe act as an incremental offset from the joint commanded position (and normally you would set the axis to 0deg to use it with the motion planner tangential knife). And as the user you'd probably define a custom M-Code to enable/disable this functionality if one isn't already implemented.

Sorry if this is a slightly messy explanation, I just thought that now was a good time to mention it while this feature is under development. And thanks again for all your work on this!

It might be working but I don't know what keys will rotate it on screen. the setup has changed what keys affect each axis.

Yes. The 3 axis setup works fine.
Joints
0=X
1=Y
2=Y
3=Z

Just to confim its not my repository, I just made existing repositories usable as easy as we could and joined some dots...
I started this because I was trying to install into Debian 11 and the old code repo was no longer maintained (it had moved).
The Etherlab team who provide the Ethercat master published their own repository
Then they got permission to add the ethercat-linuxcnc hal driver to that repository
Then Scott Laird got permission to take over management of the Ethercat hal driver and added a lot of extra drivers
Following that I made some introductions and now Scott's hal driver has a Buildbot that pushes any changes across to the Etherlab repo so everything is kept up to date in one place.
The cool thing about all this is Ethercat is available to Linuxcnc without Linuxcnc hosting anything which it cannot do due to licencing restrictions that require licencees of Ethercat be a registered company.

Finally, because I built the 2.9.x installer, I preinstalled the Etherlab repository into apt in the ISO on our downloads page.

So the easiest path to install Ethercat is to install the Debian 12 ISO and follow the sticky which is loosely Rod's repo install.
Now if you are using another Operating System or Linuxcnc 2.10, I wrote a script on this sticky which should set up apt on your system and install Ethercat.
forum.linuxcnc.org/ethercat/53785-instal...thercat-repositories

Upload the current files.
Just to be sure, that is a 4 axis/ 5 joints machine where Y axis is tandem?

To the left of the ribbon cable, are those optocouplers?
If yes, see what wires go to those optos inputs, those should be step, dir, and maybe enable, one is ground, and for testing you only need 1, the step pin, and if used the enable, but if the drives lock when powered on, then skip enable as they are enabled, so use a signal generator or parallel port, or a small crappy transformer that outputs 3 to 6V AC, should be enough to check if they work, and if they do, leave them on.
Be aware that some older drives use two inputs as step and have no dir at all, so steps on one pin turn the motor one direction, while steps on other pin move motor the other direction.
There are also "quadrature inputs" using steps on both pins, but 90 degrees between them, also no dir.
And as the last type, the 4 input ones, so when testing if the motor does not turn but just vibrates in place, check other pins, there should be 4 that cause the motor to vibrate.
All of those can be controlled by LinuxCNC, even through a parallel port, hence my hesitation to change the drives.
But if you think the time is more valuable, do change them.
And if the motors turn out to be 5 wire ones, they can be changed to bipolar, just require a bit of time and a soldering iron.
BTW, never ever remove the rotor from the stator on stepper motors, that will render them useless as they will de-magnetize.

Prototype boards arrived.

Wortwhile checking, you almost said it yourself.

You can also check "sudo dmesg" for suspicuous messages from the ethercat server. 
Provided your version logs diagnostics that way. The ethercat server installed with "sudo apt install linuxcnc-ethercat" does it anyway.

Ok, this must be the end of the road for this topic.  I'll try a new topic as I don't even see the A axis on the screen.
Anyhow, I want to thank everyone again for your help as it was a good learning experience for me.

Regards,

Routerworks

Yes , in 2.9.0-pre0 i use ec-debianize.
Now stay test debian 12 with ethercat and have execute step-by step procedure, writed by CORBETT.
Thanks for this.
I have see on debian 12 , but stay again study this problem , the value the all pin the Ethercat drives , they are written late in the associated hal pins, compared to the version I currently use with debian 10 and I can't understand why.
I tried using ethercat version 1.6 and 1.5, but the problem persists.
basically, once linuxcnc is started, the position values ​​of the axes are written in hal after a few seconds and starting from the sequence order of connection of the drives, that is, first the position value of x appears, after 1 second y, after z and so on, after having finished writing all the drives the positions are updated quickly.
Could it be that in the xml file, I configured drives that in reality are not on the machine?
I do this so as to still have all the associated pins in hal and then depending on the machine configuration they work or not equally.