Brilliant video Adam! Nice repair.

How did you manage to connect to the drives?I’ve installed the software, but I can’t get a connection

7I95T firmware with 6 PWMs on P1

(If you need just 4, use num_pwmgens=4 in the driver command line)

 
 

Thank you. Will try to pursue your suggestions tomorrow.

I definitely hear you on the stock waste and that may be a good reason to increase my guide bushing axis to be 18 inches, however, I have a method where the actual full headstock length will not be all waste, based on how my stock will insert into the drive servo, I will get about 40% of the tag 5c headstock as usable stock, so knocking it out from 5 inches to around 3 inches.

So you are saying that with a traveling steady rest and gang tooling, I should be able to have every lathe side cutting tools (ignoring drills and boring bars for now) be able to cut right at the entrance of the bushing? I am trying to imagine this. If it is possible, in that case, during a tool change, I just need the guide bushing axis to retract the stock all the way back, and only then cause the cross slide to move to the new tool location, then the stock pops back out of the bushing and cutting proceeds? I need each lathe tool to have its cutting edge right at guide bushing entrance.

My issue is with each tool holder, your actual cutting edges will not all line up, for example, I dont want my 55 degree side cutter to be cutting right at the bushing, but my parting tool has to cut 5mm beyond the bushing just based on where the cutting edges line up in my taig tool holders.

Also, if I add a Y axis and live tooling, in that case would you recommend the W axis?

How do I tell what one it is?

Finally, I have sent a PR to Linuxcnc on Github for this
github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/3995

It was a lot harder than I thought. Many thanks to grandixximo for his help ensuring all the runtime tests passed.

Yes, I need DIR signals. I don' have a preference for pinout.

We can only help you if you tell us which GUI do you use.

Update:
I've got a draft electronics panel with all the ethercat stuff working with linuxCNC, including the servos which i'm able to jog around, which is a great start! it'll be a while until they are mounted physically on the machine, but i want to get started better understanding the process of tuning them, specially since i'm basically blocked from continuing with the physical part of the build until a few more things arrive.
I was able to get the stepperonline software running on a windows 10 vm within qemu and perform the inertia autotune part( which i'll obviously have to do again when they are really mounted ). I understand after that comes a manual part in which you tune the gain along with other stuff, basically testing movements and see what minimizes the error, but i've no idea about how this is done concretely, like what steps in which pieces of software, and specially how it is done for the 2 motors that share an axis.

local host should always be 127.0.0.1/8
Don't change that.

You either need to figure out the issue with the  setting up a static IP address
with the network manager or edit the interfaces file as described in the
hm2_eth manual page.

googling debian setup static ip address

will give some more options.