plasma control panel

Thanks for that,

How do you suggest I wire the E-stop circuit? I am in Australia.

I have read that putting a E-stop between the power supply and the servo drives is a bad idea, Gecko clearly say in there manual that this will damage if not destroy the drive ,

I have also read that putting a disconnect on the AC side of the power supply can damage drives and motors

@Stefan,

The most safe option is a hard wired (physical wired) E-stop-out function to switch off the main power of the machine.
This above is okey to do in Europe following CE.

If it damages your servo drive, that is not important for court. Court only askes : why is employee damaged? And what are your preqourtions following the spec's in law.

So for Australia, you can contact a local safety institute to take care of the situation.
They will provide you information how to make your machine safe by law. It depend's on machine speed, machine risk class, etc.

For example, a waterjet will provide 4000 bar and is provided with safety line around the machine, because of danger.
Best option is to ask your local safety agent. Most of the advice is for free.

The second way is to use a 2 channel safety channel. This is mostly used by the modern automotive industrie.
forum.linuxcnc.org/24-hal-components/223...?start=710#gallery-3
It's on our forum too. Chimeno, a core member : forum.linuxcnc.org/24-hal-components/223...ver?start=710#133267

For example, if you crash with a tesla, you must wait for tesla experts to make sure for the fire resque peolpe that there is no current around by the car when it's destructed in pieces. If you have a gasoline car, you could be in fire. So how to solve this? It's not solved by one button.

Does your hypertherm have an arcOK signal?

Hypertherm has only consumable copy companys in China. Arc okey is not provided in cpc, it's provided in the slow modbuss.
Thermal dynamics has it ok to move signal. I think pin 9 + 10.

HP start's are very bad with watertable for plasma. The cupper+ electrodes are a flop.
I can give you a list of broken air valves around the globe and more wash list's but i don't do this to keep HP save for now.
At the HD section they span the crone.
I am done with HP.

I have read that putting a E-stop between the power supply and the servo drives is a bad idea, Gecko clearly say in there manual that this will damage if not destroy the drive ,

I have also read that putting a disconnect on the AC side of the power supply can damage drives and motors

Disconnecting DC power from a drive is almost always a bad idea but removing the AC from the drive power supply is fine
(how else would you turn them off?)

Gecko says not to put a switch on the DC side of the power supply. So cutting the AC side is OK.

Most estops (even the cheapie from Jaycar) have 2 sides to it. So one side is AC and when pressed stops AC power to the Servo power supply. The other side switches field power to an input to tell Linuxcnc that an estop button has been pressed. You are not allowed to use intermediate relays as they could fail. Your 2 estops should be in series so pressing either drops AC power. I was not keen on running AC power out to the table so I disable the servo drives if it is pressed but yours does not seem to have an input for that.

If I did it again, I'd use an MR series estop from ocean controls becasue you can add extra switch mechanisms to it

The whole estop thing is a bit of a minefield but when I read up on it, there were different classes of estops so choose carefully which one you follow. You don't need to drop power ti the whole electronics, just to the table and disable motion.

I did not seen an ArcOk.

I don't think you really need the 24v to 5v power supply on the THCAD as you can steal 5 volt from the encoder or stepgen. I personally think you'd be fine locating the THCAD in your cabinet with a blow back start machine.