Everything seems to be working with my Ethernet smoothstepper except th E-stop.

I get "ESTOP not assigned to a Ethernet SmoothStep​per Input!" everytime I hit it.

There is nothing written anywhere that tells me how to assign the E-stop to a smoothstepper input.

When I Start Mach, it fires up my machine and when I exit, it turns it off. Hitting the reset does nothing as far as acting like an E-stop and truning off the charge pump.

I have looked for hours and read every document I can find and there is no clue how to set this function up.

All my axis and spindle, and home switches etc work fine. It is just the Reset (E-stop) that does not work.

My real E-stop switch on the control panel kills my machine, and even tells Mach that it happened and causes the reset button on screen to flash. However the E-stop is hard wired into the breakout board, so I suppose that is the only reason it is killing the machine.

Any ideas?

I figured out how to make the reset button initiate an E-stop condition. There is a "Charge pump On in Estop" selection box and it was checked. So, I figured that part out. Only now I am not sure if it should really turn the charge pump off when you hit reset since I do have an external E-stop?


Now I have to assume that the reason I am getting the "ESTOP not assigned to a Ethernet SmoothStep​per Input!" error message is because my E-stop using port 0 pin 10. It appears the Pokeys in my Machmotion control panel is being used to report to mach that the real E-stop button has been activated. The real E-stop kills the machine regardless (which is a good thing, but Mach should know about it).


So, based on this I am not sure what I can do but turn that smoothstepper message off. I need Mach to see that the real E-stop has been pressed, which takes up that input selection so I cannot have 2 and send one to a real port that the smoothstepper would know the E-stop was pressed?


Any ideas? I would like for the smoothstepper to know the E-stop was hit rather than just disabling the message (this does not seem like the best idea).

Hi,

The chargepump signal should have nothing to do with your ESTOP.

When a PC boots, it twiddles the outputs of a parallel port. This may cause outputs such as a spindle to momently turn on. The Chargepump output is there to tell the breakout board that Mach3 is running. THAT'S IT!

 always have the chargepump in ESTOP box checked.

It is not there to be some sort of ESTOP protection. To rely on it for ESTOP protection is dangerous. If Mach3 runs off the rails, there is no guarantee that the charge pump will be removed , and there is no guarantee that mach3 will respoind to the ESTOP input.

You need to rely on external ESTOP circuitry as you are doing. The only purpose of the ESTOP input in Mach3 is to inform the software that an ESTOP has occurred and that it can rest easy while the operator sorts it out

As to the smoothstepper, the chargepump has no place as it is in total control of its outputs and won't be twiddling them while starting up.

As to the conflict between the SmoothStepper and the Pokeys I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe run the wire to the Smoothstepper rsther than the pokeys?

Cheers,

Peter

I am not sure why they are using the Pokeys to notify mach that the E-stop has been activated. The only reason I can think of is that they are saving inputs for other things.

I could pull the wires that go from the e-stop to the pokeys, and put them directly to a real input and then set that input as the E-stop. This might solve the problem, but I don't fully uderstand how pokeys is using port 0 pin 10 for something yet...I also do not know if there is a reason they are running it into the pokeys. Maybe they have a reason besides less wiring and a saved parallel input?

I did set the Chargepump back to where it stays on based on some other reading I came to the same conclusion as you above.

Is there a reason the smoothstepper needs to know that the E-stop or reset is pressed? My real E-stop kills everything, so as soon as you hit that the drives etc are dead. This means whatever the smoothstepper tries to do after that is pointless. However, maybe it needs to know when the reset button is pressed and that is why that message pops up? If none of this is important, then why not just turn off the message (I believe there is a way to do that)?