[mher]

Hey everyone,

I have some questions regarding my current setup.
I'm working on a bridgeport interact 1 mk2 on which I've changed all motors and electronics.
The motors I'm using are Leadshine ethercat servo's
I'm running mach4 with the kingstar setup.

The servo's are multi-turn absolute encoders and are wired up with a battery in line so they should be able to keep their position at all times.
I'm now wondering how to setup mach4/kingstar in such a way that mach4 remembers the machine coordinates at every start up so homing isn't required.

I hope someone here can help me out on this.
I've tried signing up to the mach4 forums but my registration has been waiting for approval for almost 2 weeks now.
My contact at kingstar hasn't gotten back to me about it either sadly.

[joeavaerage]

Hi,
I use Mach4 and have done for 8.5 years. I have incremental encoders on my servos, so exactly what is required in your situation I don't know.

The Mach4 DROs are served by the motion controller and I would have thought the the motion controller, in this case the Kingstar Ethercat Master would in turn be driven by the
servos. I assume the servos will produce probably a 32bit integer describing it location. With my servos at power up that number is 0. In your case I would expect that number to
be non-zero and in fact reflect the value stored in its memory. Thus the Kingstar Master would 'know' where the machine is and therefore so would Mach4 'know' where it is
without you having to do anything.

May I suggest write down the machine coordinates of the machine location just prior to shut down....then shut down, re-power and see whether Mach4 faithfully re-populates the machine
coordinates.

Note that Mach4's DRO's are actually generated from the integer numeric data from the motion controller. I would in the first instance look at the the DRO's simply because they are so easy to see
and interpret, but I would look for the integer data representation before I would conclude too much what Mach4 does or does not do.

Craig

[mher]

Hi Craig,

Thanks for your response!
I messed with all the settings a bit and finally figured it out.

I did the following to get it to work.
1. Opened the kingstar ethercat plugin in mach4 and made sure to set the relevant motors to ABS (absolute)
2. I homed all axis from mach4
3. After homing all motors I went to the drivers and set PR015 = 9 which is the way to tell my specific leadshine driver that the axis has been homed
4. Reboot everything to see if we still see the same values when switching to machine coordinates in mach4
5. They aren't exactly 0.00 after rebooting. X and Y axis are almost 0 still (0.04 or so) while Z tends to change about 1mm but but all these values stay the same when rebooting multiple times and from that time on any change done is being reflected after rebooting