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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
 

No need to change, they are fine. For joint 0 and motor "D1"
But I saw in the screenshot, you mix D1 and D2, can't do that. "D1" comes from ethercat-conf.xml, the first drive. You will find "D1" there.
Change D2 to D1.
 

No, the system will be linuxcnc, the head does not yet  have a BC-AMP but there is provision to mount an amplifier to existing tapped holes. So at this stage I don't measure anything!
 
Your unit should fit and it would be up to me to adapt  linuxcnc to read your system and interpret the results for height control.
I have previously beta tested some hardware for Mesa and developed an ohmic sensing component for linuxcnc, which is now part of linuxcnc that enables the hardware I tested.
linuxcnc.org/docs/stable/html/man/man9/ohmic.9.html


 

OK, I am making some headway and beginning to understand how things are being read in. The GUI loads up now, but before  I try to jog anything do I need to modify these sections too?