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There are a number of applicable standards. I am no expert on them. Aside from local country specific standards like AS4024 here in Australia, International standards include ISO 13850, IEC 60204-1 and IEC 60947-5-5
on a home machine, often a 2 pole estop button is used. one pole cuts mains power to spindle and stepper motors and the other is low voltage circuit wired to linuxcnc to tell the controller estop has been pressed. But this does not safely bring heavy machines to a stop so it gets more complicated. Also its not helpful if you have the control panel at one end of a plasma table and you want to place an estop at the other end where the console is. One approach might be to run a pull rope right around the table but running mains power to another distant switch clearly adds its own safety risks.
I suspect estop-latch predates the standards but it does allow you to create an estop chain in software. It is somewhat complicated to understand initially and I find its best to draw it on paper as a series of boxes (one for each estop-latch) each of these boxes has an OK-out pin which needs to connect to the reset pin on the next in the chain with the last OK-out connected to iocontrol.emc-enable
Each latch will have either a fault-in or ok-in pin attached to the estop button or door latch or whatever that needs to be safe before the machine will start. Finally, the iocontrol.user-request-enable pin is attached to the reset pin on the very first latch. So when the user requests the machine to be enabled (usually the orange button in axis), a short pulse is sent to the first reset and if all faults are clear, the sigal to start the machine arrives at linuxcnc. The beauty of this approach is that you can just as easily use a momentary push button to act as that reset signal if you wish.   

Taking that into the standards says the controller can have no part in the safety circuit, and every sub-circuit and every contactor needs to have  dual redundancy so a fault will not trigger anything and both circuits need to work before something's enabled. Also if there is a power outage, the machine cannot become live again when power is restored. You need to press that reset button. Also every contactor and every relay needs to be a force guided one where a non conducting pin is forced between relay contacts to guard against them welding closed from an arc.. Aside from that the safety circuit or safety relay does the same thing as estop-latch. It won't enable the machine until every component being monitored is safe.

AI did help. But if you check it out, you would know that it was built by humans for humans.

UPDATE

It wasn't me.

I ran the issue through Claude and the overlord reported back that the sidebar tab .py file had (I think) an indeterminate layout which was conflicting with the main UI file.  No error messages, but wasn't loading.

I've attached a Claude-generated document describing the issue and the suggested fix.  I've tested the fixed .py file and it's working fine.

Lcvette - might want to have a look and see if you're interested in editing PB as suggested.

snowgoer540 wrote:

How much of it was written with AI?

+1
-
Personally i do not like whatever this AI thing is called, it is an LLM and should be called as such as it has nothing to do with any kind of intelligence.
But, i do like it for some things, mainly being tired of very, very bad "Software engineers" and "Graphical Designers", and hate it as humans will misuse everything so we are inundated with slop everywhere.
I did use it to do some Python programing, and given the right direction it does produce usable code, but absolutely does not produce "production" level code without being heavily guided, and needs constant monitoring and checking as it messes up a lot.

Billy wrote:

# --- ESTOP-OUT ---
net estop-out  =>     hm2_7i96s.0.ssr.00.out-00
setp hm2_7i96s.0.ssr.00.invert-00 true# --- ESTOP-EXT ---
net estop-ext     <=  hm2_7i96s.0.inm.00.input-03#  ---estop signals---
net estop-out     <=  iocontrol.0.user-enable-out
net estop-ext     =>  iocontrol.0.emc-enable-in

Omit the first line by adding # in front of it.

Gosh... I didn't mean to open a can of worms!

Thank you very much tommylight for your suggested fix. Unfortunately when I add this line to my hal file, linuxcnc fails with the following...

"./Bridgeport.hal:313: Pin 'hm2_7i96s.0.ssr.00.out-00' was already linked to signal 'estop-out'"

(aside: line 313 is where I added tommylight's line)

I have been reading up on the HAL interface, and I have to admit that I am still quite confused. about how these things are intended to work? It is clear that they do, and for that I am thankful. It is just very hard for a newbie such as myself to make sense of.

Rod,
I appreciate all of your helpful literature and the videos you have made on various linuxcnc topics.

When you say "Its pretty well described in the man page and there was a hal tutorial about it on the forum." it would be *super* helpful if you would link the articles/threads you are referencing. Otherwise I really have no way of knowing which particular man page or forum thread you are referring to. There are a number of forum threads which seem to fit your description and which also appear to contradict one another?

I wonder if you are referencing the estop-latch man page? If so, I have read it, and I do not feel that the man page does a very good job of describing estop-latch at all! It does not explain estop-latch's purpose, when it should be used and when it should not. Further, it does not provide any usage examples. The man page does describe the options, and I expect it does so completely, but it does not explain any of them. I found it quite cryptic actually. I am still entirely confused about what problem estop-latch is intended to solve.

I understand there is some debate about whether having the hard estop signal run through linuxCNC is "compliant" or not. I must admit that I am completely in the dark as to what standard we are complying with, so I have no opinion. While I do care about safety, compliance is not a issue for me right now in my home shop.

All I am trying to achieve here is to have "hm2_7i96s.0.ssr.00.out-00" go high when "hm2_7i96s.0.inm.00.input-03" goes low.

Seems like it ought to be simple... but there is clearly some piece of the larger picture that I am missing, because it is appears that it is not simple?

Thank you for your help.

Bill

How much of it was written with AI?

Quite right. A 25% antifreeze solution is probably a good approach but I would suspect there is just so much chelating ability for that dilute a solution. Compound that with the likelyhood most people are going to replenish it with tap water, there in lies the big mistake.

Again your quite right. I guess my real focus was to give others a heads up on a possible fix without tearing it appart.

regards

Most of the spindle manufacturers I've delt with recommend a 25% solution of some kind of antifreeze. Not so much to prevent freezing but for the additives for corrosion inhibition and pump seal lubrication that are included with them. While most don't specify an automotive product, they generally are not much different from standard car antifreeze. (Using straight tap water in most kinds of cooling systems is asking for trouble.)

 
 

While I focus on open source software, I'm at least glad to see a one-time payment perpetual license at a reasonable price (no subscriptions!) and linux support (even if it is AppImage..). 

Good luck.

Hi Peter / Mesa Support,
I am setting up a machine using a 7i76e and I need a custom bitfile for my expansion board configuration.
My hardware layout is as follows:

• Motherboard: 7i76e
• Expansion Port P1: 7i78 (Step/Dir expansion)
• Expansion Port P2: 7i89 (Multi-channel encoder board)

Could you please generate a pre-builtfile (and correspondingfile) for this specific configuration?
Thank you for your help!

TWP is the 'tilted work plane' feature, you are likely after the TCP mode that keeps tool tip position stationary when the tool orientation and offsets change.
If your CAM is capable of handling tool offsets then you can keep using trivkins.

I'm sure there others out there who have or are going to run into the same problem I had.  In the spirit of sharing I'll give you my remedy which was much easier than I thought it would be.
Let me preface this by saying my 2.2 kw spindle was not allowing any flow through it from the cooling pump.  I tried blowing air through it, reaming the port and even acitic acid which didn't seem to do anything.  I was getting prepared to do a tear down which I really didn't want to get into.  I read everything I could on the net and as a last ditch effort I bought a quart of CLR descaler.  I managed to force some into circuit, shut the pump off, and left it over night.  Next morning I turned the pump on once more, not expecting anything to have changed.  To my great surprize the pump took off linke a race horse and started pumping out the CLR and all the crud it removed.  
The lesson here is that it was my fault for not using deionized water and using tap water.  Big mistake!
As I don't use the machine a lot I was always replenishing the system with tap water, about the worste thing you could do.

Recommendation.:  Use only DI water,  If possible make it a closed loop system.
Good Luck!

Disclosure first: I'm the developer and Takshak is a commercial product.
I'm posting in this section because the rules allow it — mods,
please move this if it belongs elsewhere.

What it is: a CAM package for 3-axis work and 4th-axis rotary. You bring
a model, it finds the features, you pick operations and tools, and it
posts g-code. It runs entirely on your own machine — no cloud account,
no internet needed after activation, nothing phoning home while you cut.

Posts it ships with, eighteen in all:

Shop and DIY controls — LinuxCNC · Mach3 / Mach4 · GRBL · Masso ·
Centroid · Tormach

Industrial controls — Fanuc (generic) · Haas · Mazak · Doosan ·
Brother Speedio · Mitsubishi · Fadal · Siemens 840D · Heidenhain TNC ·
Okuma OSP · Fagor · Hurco

Seventeen of those eighteen also ship a ready-made inch variant, so you
pick your control and your units and you're done. The exception is
Heidenhain TNC: it writes Klartext, and I won't ship a Klartext inch
post until I've checked the TNC feed-word convention against a real
control. I'd rather ship one less than ship a guess.

Also worth knowing:

- Rotary is a first-class part of it, not an afterthought bolted on.
- It runs on Windows and on Linux. The Linux build is a single AppImage.
- It's a one-time perpetual licence, not a subscription. $199 for the next 30 days, $399 later. If it's no good, there's 30 days to get your money
back, no argument.

What it isn't: it's CAM, not CAD. And it's new — 1.0.3 went on sale this
week. I'd rather say that plainly than have someone find out.