[rogerfries]

Hi all, I have an old Hypertherm Powermax 1000 on a home made plasma table. I recently upgraded from Mach 3 to Mach 4 and my old THC did not seem to have a plugin for Mach 4. No problem, I upgraded my THC to the newer Warp 9 Warprunner. My old THC (Texas Microcircuits THC 301) came with a CNC interface board that installed inside the Plasma cutter to perform the voltage divider etc., but the voltage divider ratio of this old board was not compatible with the Warp runner. I picked up the CNC4PC C98 board 50-1 voltage divider board to fix that. Now I need to deal with the ARC OK signal. The Hypertherm CNC Interface CPC port has 4 wires, 2 are to trigger the torch, the other 2 I'm thinking are Arc ok, but I can't seem to confirm that. My old THC 301 board has these wires going to terminals marked ArcOK, but it also has a ferrite ring around the power lead with a HECS sensor (Hall Effect Current Sensor) on it which I was told was needed to sense Arc OK. I'm thinking IO can just route these 2 wires to the Arc OK on the Warprunner, but I'm left wondering why the old board went through the trouble of adding this sensor to the power output if the machine already reported the Arc OK? I can't find much information on this old Plasma cutter. Looking at the schematic, these wires are labeled as /MM, but I don't know what /MM Means. Does anyone know for sure how to wire a powermax 1000 to my Warprunner. I'm a home hobby user, just for fun, so please don't tell me to buy a new plasma cutter.

Thanks!

[rogerfries]

I think my old THC 301 plasma interface board had 2 different (optional) ways to detect ARC OK and I incorrectly wired them both up "Belt and suspenders". So I don't think I ever needed the HECS since my Powermax 1000 had ARC Ok wires. So I wired these 2 wires to my Warp runner J7 Pins 1 & 2 Arc OK Input pins and I'm getting a flickering Arc OK Led, Both on the warp runner and in Mach4. I suspected Plasma noise, so I turned off the plasma machine and simulated the Arc OK by jumping J7 Pins 1 & 2 and I have the exact same behavior of a flickering Arc OK LED. Any Ideas why the warp runner would not have a solid Arc OK Led when jumped and Plasma cutter attached?

Thanks

[rogerfries]

I'm 99.9% sure I now know the problem. I'll verify tonight, but the problem must be low voltage from the power supply. The ESS wants only 5 v, but the Warp runner needs 12-24v. I was only giving it 5v. I'm surprised it worked at all.