I need to use my mill manually while I am converting it to EMC. Because the spindle VFD is mounted at the back of the mill and I removed the DRO, I decided to just hook the linear encoders and the VFD to my Pico UPC and use EMC as a DRO and VFD controller. I figured, no big deal, put the hand-wheels back on, a little wiring, start EMC, unset E-stop, controller on, MDI, s1000 m3 and go. So far so good. The spindle is turning, I grab the X hand-wheel, give it a turn and ... the spindle stops and I get a following error. Dooh.
I looked at my .hal files to see if I could change anything to keep from getting following errors while still having EMC on. Nothing easy came to mind, so I did a search on linuxcnc.org for "DRO" and found this: http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?PyVCP >From this, I created these: http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/bridgeport/pyvcp-dro2-bp2.hal http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/bridgeport/pyvcp-dro2-bp2.xml I haven't tried the DRO/VFD program in the shop yet. I commented the ppmc lines out, so I could run it in my office without the UPC. All that works are the spindle buttons. If you want to run it, just copy these two files to your /home/your_user_name/emc2 directory, From a terminal window, cd to home/your_user_name/emc2 and run: "halrun pyvcp-dro2-bp2.hal &". Another window should come up with the DRO in it. The ampersand at the end of the command will let you go back the the terminal window and run: "halmeter &" as many times as you need for looking at the state of signals, pins and parameters. If anyone has suggestions on how to make this better, please let me know. It would be nice to get a complete list of tags available for the .xml file and how the number format tag works. It shouldn't be too difficult to study the original to get it to work with a parallel port and software encoder. The tricky part will be in coming up with a DAC for the VFD. I first thing that comes to mind is a dual parallel port card to provide the six input pins for three encoders. For the VFD analog in, use eight output pins to a DAC chip (plus one for an output enable?) and 10 Volt power supply. For the Forward and Reverse, two more output pins and a pair of opto-isolators to sink the VFD inputs. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, right? -- Kirk Wallace (California, USA http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ Hardinge HNC lathe, Bridgeport mill conversion, doing XY now, Zubal lathe conversion pending) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
