External ESTOP trouble

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)
Thanks,

B

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.

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.

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 and it should work fine.

Billy Boy wrote:

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?
 

Yes, you should use estop-latch if you have an external estop button (or a safety relay but that's another story). Its pretty well described in the man page and there was a hal tutorial about it on the forum.

If your machine has a single or more e-stops wired in series, and no other safety stuff >>>
>>>NO ROD, he does not need or should use e-stop latch.<<<
Having said that, it is nice to learn to use it, and it does what is supposed to do perfectly, but the built in simple e-stop works perfectly fine for simple safety e-stop, as proven by over 20 industrial machines i have retrofitted and having to use e-stop latch on two of them, some over 15 ton heavy.
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E-stop is extremely important on many machines, on some it is just a nuisance, so not something you go around telling people "just use e-stop latch" and everything is fine.
On machines with brushed DC servos, that e-stop must be wired to "extreme limits" switches, not the same switches the machine uses as limits, so in case a MOS-FET/Transistor shorts and the motor goes full speed, the normal limits will do nothing, hence another set of limits wired to e-stop that cuts all power to servo drives and engages brakes if any.