Help on getting spindle indexer reading into axis?

I've started changing over my machines from mach 3 to linuxcnc. This particular lathe has a single index per rev which produced reasonably good threading in mach. I have 2 questions - how do you set linux up to read the pulse (count the revs) and will it thread with a single pulse?

cheers

yes it will , use stepconf to produce your config , and select an input pin as spindle index and also a pin for spindle-a
( connect your index to both these pins ) , however ideally you really need an encoder with a of least of say 60 - 120 slots
will make life a lot easier .
you can also import your mach config using stepconf

Just to clarify: LinuxCNC with one pulse per rev will work a little better for threading than Mach with one pulse per rev.
However it will work better still with more pulses + index.

Hi thanks for the replies chaps, I was hoping I could use the single pulse just for the time being (fully intend to go with an encoder when time allows) However I am struggling with the setup procedures in LCNC. Could you help me a little futher with the setup:

yes it will , use stepconf to produce your config , and select an input pin as spindle index and also a pin for spindle-a
( connect your index to both these pins )

I can't quite understand the above? I can control the speed of my spindle so have got the basics working but i don't see how to get it to show the correct speed or to set the correct speed etc. Bare with me, i'm a little slow!

have you used stepconf program to produce your config ?
without knowing how your controllng the spindle or if it has a vfd etc , it's difficult to advise
you need to set spindle scale , you need to know the top speed and set this as max speed in your ini

Sorry, yes I did use stepconf to produce config and i'm using a vfd to control 3 phase motor which i have managed to get working with the PWM? The spindle speed scale is up to 3000 and mine is max 1000, also i dont see an actua speedl value from the indexer? But its the spindle setup page that i'm confused with. I know this LCNC is better than mach but its hard to setup! For me anyway...

Your HAL file will (probably) load an encoder component. It should then be being set to counter-mode 1 and the index and A phases of it should then be connected to the parport.
If stepconf did its job right you should also see the encoder position being connected to motion.spindle-revs and the velocity being connected to motion.spindle-speed-in.

This last signal (encoder.0.velocity) is what you would need to connect to a spindle speed display, but as it is in revs-per second you would need a scale function to get rpm. stepconf might have done this for you.

Thanks for the reply Andy, this is a real steep learning curve for me (struggling to be honest) Is all of the above in the HAL file?

Yes. Try to read and understand the HAL file. If it helps, the motion pins are described here:
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/man/man9/motion.9.html

And other pins, such as iocontrol, halui, etc are all described in the HAL components section near the bottom of here:
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/