I’m lost. I can’t get the ESS to connect to my BOB & motors.

I’m lost. I can’t get the ESS to connect to my BOB & motors. I think something is misconfigured.

I had issues with opto-couplers on the inputs. Check your current ratings maybe on the i/o?

@Dale_Royer Yes, I’m gonna do that tonight. Just bought a new multimeter for that. I saw some issues about a charge pump (whatever that is). Mach is so different from what I’m used to. Nothing comes easy with any builds I have. I dread dealing with that VFD and spindle. I’m having enough problems just wiring this E-Stop (it has 4 screw terminals, not 2 or 3).

The charge pumps I’ve dealt with increase voltage with a fast diode and a capacitor circuit (I was building a an h- bridge at the time with 4 pnp transistors and needed the higher voltage to trigger the high side). Finicky circuits.

I just checked the voltage for the DIR and it was like 98 mV, which is about half what it should be, I think.

I’m foreign to those parts. Only heard about some of them with my brief experience with arduino/raspberrypi and having to troubleshoot my computers. I guess this’ll be another one of those “learning experiences.” What would cause there to be a voltage disparity there? I checked the 1.2v & 3.3v checks for the ESS and they were fine.

Odd. Were you able to toggle it to see the two states?

I forgot to do that. Let me check. Do I just send the command in the opposite direction?

A tech support person messaged me about it, but I didn’t follow everything

Yes, that should do it.

Gotta run to the atm to pay for dinner, but I’ll check when I get back. Apparently you can plug 3 different BOB s into the ESS and get like 9 different axes on here…at least 6. Not sure exactly how that would work.

If I’d known more about the mechanics of the rack & pinion systems it probably would have been better to go with those over the ballscrews, but I’m hoping I will be able to get enough velocity out of those to do what I want

98.3 mV going forward and 173 mV going back to 0

Hmmm… is that from ground as a reference?

Yes. I just measured it again. Weird.

No sense

What happens if you measure without the dir wires connected?

You’d expect voltages like that from a pulsed signal, maybe that’s step not direction?

But the voltages were steady. They didn’t jump around, like I would’ve figured

From a step cmd that is