Ok, on the mini-mill i've been having some failures and broken cutters because the vfd keeps dropping out on odd errors, and i did not have the fault relay wired to Mach as i was using it to control the coolant

Anyways, rewired this afternoon and now have the fault relay coming in on an input to Mach, stuck a brain in to monitor it and throw the Stop (1003) button when the fault relay trips on the vfd. It seems to stop Ok so that should at least stop the wasted money in broken tools.

But, even though the input is still triggered (vfd not reset yet) you can still restart the code?

Is there a better way to do full stop and hold it until a reset is done?

Change it to throw the Mach reset button maybe??

Yes, Reset is what you want, stop just stops things but nothing to stop you pressing Start again if you didn't notice why it stopped.

I prefer to use the macropump for something like that and have a message box pop up on screen to tell you what is wrong and you then have to OK the message box before you can continue, so no excuse for just pressing Start again without sorting.

Another thing I do on the big lathe which uses the ESS. I have the Start button as a VB button and it looks at the Spindle Enabled Input from my servo drive, it also looks at the High and Low gear ratio limits. The lever has 3 positions and I sometimes use it so I can rotate the chuck, ie I put it in the middle neutral position.
 Anyway the code in the Start button looks at the 3 inputs and if all seen then it will do the Start OEM code, if not a message box pops up  telling me I am a tit

BTW with the CSMIO I think doing the Reset button as a VB button is a NoNo, had that on the Chiron at first (screen was from the Bridgeport) and I could not understand why I could not get Mach out of Reset.

Hood

Ok i'll remove the brain and use macro pump, something simple like this?

If IsActive(INPUT1) Then
   DoOEMButton(1021)'put Mach into reset
   MsgBox "VFD Fault - Processing Halted"
   End
End If

You could just do the Stop if you wished as you have the message box telling you what has happened and thus you know not to press Start until it is sorted.

Pressing Reset may require you re-home, depends on the setup, for example Step/Dir servos with an enable could possibly move slightly when enable was taken away with the Reset, same for steppers in they have an Enable as they will jump to the nearest full step.

Pressing Stop should not need a Re-home as the servos/steppers will still be holding position.

With the CSMIO/IP-A this is not a problem as Encoders are monitored but don't think it is the IP-A you have on that machine.
Hood

Nah its a little UC100 usb gizmo on this one.

The machine will need to do a full e-stop as that is the only way to reset the VFD - power cycle it, pressing e-stop puts mach into reset anyway so i might as well just go into reset first.

I'm getting pretty good a restarting code now even down to re-CAMing it and running the missed sections again, always do a re-home first, so far its been ok, its just the wasted tools that were really grinding my nuts - but thats my fault for not thinking of a vfd fault in the first place i guess.

You really shouldn't keep getting VFD errors, there's a setting wrong, the unit is wrong for the application or it's a faulty unit.
Have you considered replacing the VFD?

Well it's still under guarantee as only bought a few months ago, I cant see a setting causing the device to throw a motor winding short error, but then again, the spindle is new as well, one is reputable and other is chinese.

Its very random though, I have more parts to run tomorrow so will find out if my rewire disturbed anything or its still there, problem is, whichever supplier i contact will likely just blame the other.

Ok, did a two-hour non-stop run this morning, worked perfectly.

The macro code i posted is a bit too basic, once tripped the message always stays on screen and mach is stuck in a loop until the vfd is reset.

Whats a good way to ensure the message only shows/resets mach if the code or spindle is running?

I tried adding GetOemLED(800) to the "If" line of the macro but it still gets locked up.