Thank you for your prompt reply. There are plenty of rapid ways to manually home the quill feed on a mill so the ‘Z’ limit pins are certainly available. I guess I have put off learning HAL programming for about as long as I can. At least I will have plenty of time to work on it.
Protoneer <https://blog.protoneer.co.nz/> is a New Zealand company that mostly serves the needs of the GRBL community down that way. Their eBay store <https://www.ebay.com/str/protoneer> is shut down at the moment because New Zealand is doing a hard lock-down. I came across them when I was looking for alternatives to LinuxCNC running on near voting age Intel PCs to run my mill. Fortunately, I also came across Machinekit on the Beaglebone and judged it to be a more capable choice. The Protoneer driver conversion boards are very similar to the boards you mentioned but I already had a bunch of them on hand when a job came along that I really didn’t want to turn down. I am aware if the voltage sensitivity problem and was starting to design an optical isolation board but I couldn’t afford to wait so I used them. So far I have been lucky but even if I fry 10 Beagles, I still make a profit and keep a probable future customer. On Saturday, April 11, 2020 at 9:01:14 PM UTC-7, Hong Mai Ha Osterstrom wrote: > > I am using a Beaglebone / CRAMPS 2.2 cape fitted with Protoneer ‘Pololu > Socket To External Driver conversion boards’ to provide signals to the > large drivers and steppers on my (bigger-than-a-Bridgeport) retro-fitted > Induma mill. The X and Y axis's are working as they should so I can use the > mill in 2 axis mode to build the mounting hardware for a CNC quill feed to > give me a Z axis. > Every thing is going fine but I really, really miss having a working > ‘Start / Continue’ button right next to the big red E-Stop button on the > head of the mill. I have a fun little 3D printer so I quite understand why > the CRAMPS cape doesn’t need to implement such a button but I am dealing > with several hundred pounds of Iron moving at 4+ inches a second. Mousing > about on a simulation of what I hope is happening is not the same as facing > what is really happening with my thumb hovering over the E-Stop button. > I ran LinuxCNC on a friends mill in the late 1990s and it had a real > ‘Start / Continue’ button. Did that capability get carried over into > Machinekit and if so, where does it emerge on the Beaglebone? I already > have a pair of 2 X 23 stacking headers between the Beaglebone and the > CRAMPS cape to improve cooling so it would be no big deal to add a breakout > board. Any information would be welcome. > > By the way, I am using my wife's account. My name is Gordon Osterstrom > -- website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github: https://github.com/machinekit --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Machinekit" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/machinekit/50de04df-8206-4e81-9e99-7d65e76f44cf%40googlegroups.com.
