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Good point, it does have a couple of controllers. I will clone the drive just in case and do some mix and matching on cables and controllers and see how that works out.

Thanks for the reply

Have to act on appTimePeriod message.
Check line two in this file github.com/dbraun1981/hal-cia402/blob/ma...le/ethercat-conf.xml and well you can copy that line to your file.
You can add line 4 as well if it isn't there already. Pay attention to placements, line 2 in the master line. Line 4 under slave, for the three drives.

The pin numbers on that label are the exact pin numbers on a parallel port, so enter those in the StepConf wizard.
As for spindle, almost all new VFD's will accept 0-5V or 0-10V that can be set, so setting it to 5V and using a resistor and a capacitor will give you roughly 0-4.5V of analog voltage from a 5V parallel port, or 0-3V from a 3.3V parallel port.

Send one to Rod, her can make it work easily as he has THCAD that turn 0-10V to frequency, and he is very detailed when testing stuff.
I do not have a laser (i do have a big box of lasers, but He-Ne ones at low power) so i can not help with testing it. I can attach it to a plasma torch and see how long it lasts with all the interference plasma causes, but that is it. Oh yeah, Rod can also test this, as he has plasma machines.

Failing hard drives will cause latency spikes for sure, despite appearing to work OK.
Bad PATA/SATA cable can also appear as failing drive, so it pays off to change the cable first.
If you do suspect a failing HDD controller, most boards will have 2 separate controllers, even older ones, so try the other one. Yes, there are many boards with 2 of PATA/IDE controllers, and there are many boards with 2 SATA controllers where usually one does also RAID.

Yes everything in the bios is off. The only thing that has changed in the pc since it was running the older version of PlasmaC without issue has been the hard drive. I can only think that either it has an issue or the controller has an issue, maybe that’s why the original drive failed.
I will try a different motherboard and HDD over the weekend

Thanks for the help

Thanks, I will take the practical approach and leave it alone.

I did catch that a bit afterwards, lol. thank you for keeping an eye out though. I tried to un-E-Stop, power button on and home all axis. No motor movement, drives are still in preop state. Have attached the resulting output.

Steve Cap