[CNC-Joe]

I am in the final stages of finishing up my 1985 SuperMax Anilam Crusader 2 conversion to Larken Viper200's. I have the mill up and running, the servo's reasonably tuned. I am very impressed with what I can now do with this machine (Mach3, Vectric VCarve Pro, etc.).

However, I am having troubles getting the Fault lines to work with my CNC4PC C1 Break Out Board (BOB).

I have wired the 12 Volt Ground for the Viper200's, and the 5 Volt Ground of the CNC4PC BOB to one common ground (backplane of the electrical panel).

I have wired the Viper200 "Stop Out" to the Input #11 on the CNC4PC BOB.

I can not get the input to see a change of state - by forcing the Viper200 into fault mode by turning the trimpots on the Viper200. It does cause a fault on the Viper200 (evidenced by the RED LED's on and flashing).

It does not change state on the input of the BOB though.

Has anyone interfaced a CNC4PC BOB with the Viper200's and gotten the faults to work?

If so - any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Joe
(CNC isn't a passion..... its an addiction...)

[CNC-Joe]

Just thought I'd update this post.

I did get this worked out. I had a couple of problems.

1) I did not have the CNC4PC C1 BOB properly set to the "PULL-UP" position on the resistor jumper. I blame this on a dark electrical cabinet and my bad eyesight. A couple of nice bright magnetic LED lights, and moving the right jumper helped.

2) The next problem I had was that I didn't have a good enough ground between the CNC4PC C1 BOB 5 volt power supply ground and the 12 volt Viper200 ground and the back plane of the cabinet. I basically have everything on the same ground - so that it doesn't float.. I re-tapped the hole, and made sure it had a good ground - and that also helped.

3) Next I went to Mach3, Config-> Ports and Pins-> Inputs-> and set up the input, went to the viper board and turned the current limit pot until it triggered a latched fault..and whah-lah - the fault mode is now working.

Nice to see this old mill able to run for hours now, running megabytes of machine code.

I will put out a booklet on my conversion in the near future. But its pretty much done (wait a minute.... are these projects ever really done??? heck no - there's always things that you want to add.. )

I did add an electronic Z-zero plate to the set-up - and that works great.
I will also be adding an electronic edge finder in the future too