External ESTOP trouble

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Billy Boy
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02 Sep 2026 19:25 #349231 by Billy Boy

External ESTOP trouble was created by Billy Boy

Hi,

I am retro-fitting my 1968 Bridgeport Series 1 Papertape NC machine with rpi5/Mesa7i96s/Gecko203v.

I've got everything working pretty well it seems, except for the ESTOP.

I have (and want) an external/manual ESTOP-in button. It is currently setup Normally Closed and appears to be successfully plumbed through to the GUI, which is to say that the GUI ESTOP button tracks the status of the hardware ESTOP-in button perfectly.

The issue is that my ESTOP-out is no-longer tracking either the GUI ESTOP or the hardware ESTOP-in. It just stays asserted all the time with no change of state.

To be clear, before I attempted to plumb in the hardware ESTOP-in button, my GUI ESTOP was correctly plumbed through to my ESTOP-out so that it would allow me to disable the steppers.

Aside: I have not been able to find any documentation that really explains how ESTOP is expected to work? I'm unclear on if I should work with estop_latch or not? The estop_latch documentation is also pretty thin and does not appear to include any examples for either simple or complex configurations?

Here is my current configuration... (generated by pncconf)

# --- ESTOP-OUT ---
net estop-out  =>     hm2_7i96s.0.ssr.00.out-00
setp hm2_7i96s.0.ssr.00.invert-00 true# --- ESTOP-EXT ---
net estop-ext     <=  hm2_7i96s.0.inm.00.input-03#  ---estop signals---
net estop-out     <=  iocontrol.0.user-enable-out
net estop-ext     =>  iocontrol.0.emc-enable-in

Thanks,

B

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tommylight
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02 Sep 2026 20:50 #349241 by tommylight

Replied by tommylight on topic External ESTOP trouble

If using Axis GUI (other GUI's may also have this), use the "show hal configuration" from the machine menu to see if the hal stuff is working correctly, on the left side choose the pins to watch on the right side, then toggle e-stop and see what toggles and what not.

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Billy Boy
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02 Sep 2026 23:32 #349245 by Billy Boy

Replied by Billy Boy on topic External ESTOP trouble

That is a cool trick! Glad to know about Show Hal Configuration. Thanks.

I am using the Axis GUI.

When I watch the ESTOP-ext variable (is variable the correct term here?) I see that it changes state when I toggle the hardware ESTOP. Hal Show Configuration shows yellow when the hardware ESTOP is not active and red when the hardware ESTOP is active. That seems right to me.

When I watch ESTOP-out, it just stays red the whole time regardless of what I do in hardware or software. This seems wrong to me, but it is also consistent with the problem I am having.

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tommylight
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03 Sep 2026 02:19 #349251 by tommylight

Replied by tommylight on topic External ESTOP trouble

Probably needs to be tied to one of those pins, not as you have them to iocontrol as it is for enabling/disabling the machine so not controlled by e-stop.
You can also wire it directly in hal

net estop-ext  =>   hm2_7i96s.0.inm.00.input-03  hm2_7i96s.0.ssr.00.out-00

and it should work fine.

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External ESTOP trouble

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