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That might be the polar opposite of what i need, hahaha. well, unless you also want to play cyberpunk while you mill.

I found some refurb mini lenovos. $198 with win 10 pro lic. i can get plenty (hundreds) so stock is fine.

They only have one rj45, but they have wifi. Not hard to just buy one and try out the ethercat. JMC now has ethercat versions of their integrated drives (the ones on my prototype), so maybe also worth testing those too. Create a second control for the prototype mill basically and iron out the bugs without messing up the working machine.

ahh ok.
cool.

Want a machine? hahahaha.

I've been rolling all my numbers and am pretty close to setting a price for 2 early bird buyers. Its looking very promising. for the price of a loaded tormach 440 mine has delta servos, "high speed" atc spindle, laser tool setter, probe, thk ground screws and precision grade rails. 1500 inch per min rapids.

I hope I can figure out how to make it appeal to people who are in that zone (as opposed to the ones that want a shapeoko, or on the other end a real datron)

If the long mill guys can sell 200 machines a month, I am pretty sure I can manage 2!

I think the framework is already there in Linuxcnc but will need to be ported to the custom homing module
if home sequence < 0 then find the other joint(s) and home together.
Once both homed, if a home_offset exists, move each joint by the home offset

So if a gantry needs to be squared, the home_offset for each side will be different and account for the squaring.

I have not looked at the various homing modes again but it might be possible to do this internally by setting the parameters in the drive accordingly. without linuxcnc involvement.

 

Are you Chinese? If yes, I can help you with remote configuration.

The final word from Delta on Gantry axis control.

Quote -

This gantry mode, intended for our EtherCAT controllers  did die.   However; they left some features in the drive that can help you accomplish this.
 
There is no substitute for the upper EtherCAT CNC control to have a gantry mode.  If the two controllers mentioned below don’t have a gantry mode, then you may be able to use some extra features in the B3A-E
(example part number for 400W, 220V ASD-B3A-0421-E) that can help. There can be two methods.

 

The B3A-E servo drive has “pulse train” mode.  Meaning when you use it, the drive is not in EtherCAT mode.  It can be set up to follow the encoder of
another drive – the slave of the gantry.  The position of the send drive can be monitored via EtherCAT and the other general operational status can be monitored via General Purpose I/O .If you can put both on the network, and use the control’s gantry mode, you can connect the encoder output of each into the other and EtherCAT can monitor
it.   

You may need to sacrifice (swap out) a PDO for this extra encoder into each of the gantry drives.Extra logic for the machine will need to be written to monitor for skew.It would be better to do this with Absolute encoders, correct skew on power up and make sure it does not go out of skew during operation.


 
Above is just an overview.  There is not white paper because the next step of control was supposed to be implemented in our EtherCAT controls, but never was. 

However, because the drive can be set-up to monitor and send the secondary pulse input over EtherCAT, it is possible for a third-party control to use it for gantry mode

The gantry question is till open ended but I would have to assume like with standard Mesa or any other motion controller using the XXYZ, or XYYZ axis setup would send the synchronized commands for tandem motors. This works. As far as whether this is the case with ECAT, I have nothing specific to offer as I do not use tandem axis control aka gantry.

As far as scales, many drives offer a scale interface that can used within the drive as the primary position FB device and that position from the scale would become the FB sent to LCNC. But, again it is open loop from drive to controller and closed loop in the drive. Nothing changes there.

The difficulty with gantry is if you wanted use an auto squaring routine. Typically, if a 23bit encoder is used this makes the alignment pretty easy. You would unlink the tandem motors and and then use step jog or MPG mode to square the gantry by moving each motor until they are square to the opposing axis, say square x to y. Once complete and you like the final position, you would then use the drives routine internally to set the current locations of both motors to zero and store the motor positions in the drive. At that point you would need to somehow tell LCNC that when the axis FB is known from the drive, assume it has been homed. Or some variation otherwise.

There is another thread on the homing issues. A custom homing function is being tapped about with Rodw. There is a link to the github file. But, as far as I know, it is beta and does not show functionality for gantry type homing for those who do not have the higher grade 23bit multi turn Absolute encoders with battery storage of the encoder position through power cycle. In my opinion this would be the only way as I can tell with LCNC to have homing with a gantry. Given the pure open loop controller/drive interface and the I/O lag based on the Etherlabs ECAT driver, if you tried to use the I/O from the drive to catch the home switch and then catch the index pulse, you could have a roving home target.

You could however, use the RS422 encoder output from your drive which many have to catch the home switch input and then the subsequent index pulse using a mesa card. I do not know if it is 100% possible to do as I have never tried it, nut it is plausible. But, this adds wires and a Mesa card which may be nearly the cost of the upgraded encoder requiring the already available internal drive homing to all the work.

I am still running down this rabbit hole and if by chance I figure it out, I will post it with all the files needed.

I hope you'll do the same.

Glad I could help. This is what I do for a living but not with LCNC. I still learning the ins and outs just everyone else. Some of it makes sense, but much of it is wrapped around older technology with ParPort emulation through hal using step and direction drives. While they work and are cheap, they do not serve my specific interests or needs. I am a CNC engineer so I expect my machines and my builds to be as precise as the ones I build and design for my clients. If not more so. LCNC, is a free software that has ECAT, TCP, and some other functionality that make it affordable for my needs leaving me extra cash for the better hardware. Mach4 also has EtherCat but no TCP nor kinematics. That makes it very hard to to do true 5x work. So, I am going to use LCNC to build a very accurate +-.005mm volumetric 5x mill for my needs. Well, hopefully.

Have a great night guys. Feel free to reach out, I either know or know someone who does and will gladly help as much as I can.

in canada the green stuff is something else. we mine the yellow stuff

holy shit, this export restrictions list is fascinating. restrictions on cnc machines, cmm, LDVT, certain carbide shapes

but yeah fish, im pretty sure we live in the same greater area

Mesa boards and combos that work for analog +-10V drives, all 25 pin ones
7i97T
7i92TM + 7i77 <<< notice the M, it can be directly plugged into 7i77
7i92TM + 7i83 + 7i85 <<< notice the M, it can be directly plugged into 7i85
7i96S + 7i83 + 7i85 <<< needs a DB25 to IDC26 cable very cheap at Mesa shop
7i76E + 7i83 + 7i85 <<< needs a DB25 to IDC26 cable very cheap at Mesa shop
There are also other boards, but the 7i96S combo can be easily found, the first two should be available as it was noted by PCW, might also be sold out.

Stuxnet ???

Centrifuges n stuff for enriching that green stuff that shall not be mentioned, as i do not want to end up on a list, if i ever got to US.

I had a look at the repo that a previous post referred to, it appears that it would work. I just have to get off the lazy backside and have a go. Although I guess I’ll have to do the testing myself based on previous experience.
But I need to finish a side project or 2 lol.

Asus ROG STRIX B550i but it is not cheap and has only 1 ethernet port.
Using one of those for more than 2 years, i think, my main PC.

Mate if you read the README on the GitHub page you will find out what do with the bin & bit files.
You also need to read the section about updating the Linuxcnc driver.

It helps to read, understand and implement the instructions that the developer gives.
The developer recommends Linuxcnc 2.10 or a patched version of 2.9.2
It’s been a good 6 months since I was evaluating this project so I’m not too sure where Linuxcnc is up to regarding the patches.
If it was possible to get one of the Ethernet chips going with original Mesa source there would be the ability to remove the on board RAM and get access to many more pins for IO.

Hello everyone, I'm going straight to the point hehe, I have in my possession a Maxifet AF series 60 10/20 driver and the respective motor that drives it, this is a DC driver and apparently the motor is connected in speed mode since it has a tachometer. It is connected to the driver, I would like to recover this driver but I can't find any datasheet on the internet, I have been reading some threads here in the forum about DC drivers and something very common is the analog +/- 10V data interface that the driver housing says. If this is the case, first I would like some advice on which control cards to use. I was thinking of using a 7i33TA. I imagine that this can be used with any card with a 50-pin control connector. If someone could point out one, preferably Ethernet, I don't know if there is one. Mesa card, with at least an analog output +/- 10V, I know that 7i96 has an analog output, I'm not sure if it's -10V and I think it is designed for spindle control, this output could be used to control one axis since I only need one axis
Anyway, if anyone has any information about this driver that they can provide and a combination of board cards to control it, thank you in advance, I leave a photo of the driver and a brief diagram of the pins that are used in the machine where it is installed, greetings   

Probably something missing in the hal or ini file, so do a side by side comparison in a text editor.

Is it possible you have disabled the pwmgen in the hal file?

You can check all available hal pins/parameters/functions with:

halcmd loadrt hostmot2
halcmd loadrt hm2_eth board_ip=10.10.10.10
halcmd show all > all.txt

Then to clean up/unload the drivers:

halrun -U