Integrating a BCL-AMP capacitive sensor to LinuxCNC

Its in the hostmot2 manual page (though you need LinuxCNC 2.10
to have the periodm module in the manual)

I can make firmware for the 7I76E with a periodm. Do you want it to use
a pin on the 7I76e encoder input? (I think the 7I96S version replaces the
7I76E encoder index with the periodm input)

That firmware would be great.

While you're at it, can I get a firmware that uses 7i76e and 7i85s x1 on P1 please? Or perhaps duplicate for 7i85s on both P1 and P2 for future proofing.

The periodm pin can be on 7i76e encoder index is fine. 7i85s needs at least 2 encoder A inputs, and convert two of the stepgens to pwmgens so it will have 2 stepgens and 2 pwmgens.

Thanks!

Do you need direction on the PWMgens?
 

No

Uthayne-

I've attached a zip file with the relevant config files. I'm using QtPlasmaC so the .prefs file is important as well. Since QtPlasmaC puts some limits on what are acceptable for the Arc Voltage Offset and the Arc Voltage Scale (it basically expects a MESA THCAD of some sort), for scaling I used a combo of encoder scaling in custom.hal:

# The QtPlasmaC GUI does not allow voltage offsets higher than 5 digits, so scale this down here
setp    hm2_7i92.0.encoder.00.scale 100

and the offset and scale in the laser_cutter.prefs file:

[PLASMA_PARAMETERS]
Arc Voltage Offset = 22900
Arc Voltage Scale = 0.10

This leaves me with a ~50-100 range for "arc voltage" in the QtPlasmaC GUI and is sensitive enough to hold height well, at least for the values in the table that Taloot published a while back (0.5-1.5mm). 

You might also be interested in the fake "ohmic" probing and fake "arc OK" signals I implemented in the custom.hal file:

and since I like to be able to re-gen the config from pncconf, I made a python script to set the relevant values in the prefs file:

Scott

7I76E config with PeriodM on 7I76E encoder index and 2X 7I85S
each with 3 step/dir plus last stepgen channel replaced with
2X PWMgens. So 11 stepgens, 4 PWMgens and 9 encoders total.

 
 

Most of QtPlasmaC is able to be customised.
You can change the range and the step rate of the spinboxes by having the following in a file named qtplasmac_custom.py in the config directory:  
It would be nice to put together a custom file for use with fibre laser.
 

Ah, that's very interesting! I'll try to keep track of customizations that would make sense as we continue to integrate our machine. I've been pretty pleased at how workable QtPlasmaC is "out of the box" for our simple fiber laser with very little additional customization.

On thing I've wondered is if there an existing thread or any discussion/thoughts on the possibility of adding additional properties to a material (e.g. laser focus height)? If not I'll start a separate thread. I expect that would take some doing.

Thanks!

Scott

shasse wrote:

Ah, that's very interesting! I'll try to keep track of customizations that would make sense as we continue to integrate our machine.

We could possibly add a fibre laser mode into QtPlasmaC and integrate any required changes into the base code.

One thing I've wondered is if there an existing thread or any discussion/thoughts on the possibility of adding additional properties to a material (e.g. laser focus height)?

Not that I am aware of.

I expect that would take some doing.

Yes, it probably would. I will look into it.
If we did have a fibre laser mode we could do it there.