Spindle motor control problems

[Jon Elson <jmelson-at-artsci.wustl.edu>]

I'm sending this mostly for Fred Proctor and Ray Henry
to comment on.  I finally got around to hooking up the
spindle start/stop signals from the auxilliary parallel
port and opto relay board to my spindle VFD.

What is most odd is it works perfectly in manual mode,
both from the on screen TkEMC button/drop-down menu
and from the F9 function key, but does NOT work correctly
from either MDI entries like M03 and M04 or the same
commands in a program.  It looks like it does half of what
is needed for M03 and M04, which is to switch off the spindle
brake.  (I don't have one, but I left the bit assignment of the
Bridgeportio definitions there, so I get a relay ON for brake
off, and a relay off for brake on.)  When I do a spindle stop
by any method, the brake relay goes off, which is supposed to
turn the failsafe brake on.  When I do a manual spindle start,
the appropriate relay turns on after a delay.  When I do the
auto or MDI spindle start, the spindle drive relay turns OFF,
EVEN if it had been left on manually!  The status display
shows the M4 or M3 condition of that modal word, and the
spindle display at the top of the window shows the correct
state.

It appears that either the delay for the brake to release never
ends when taking the spindle start from the RS-274 command,
or there is another definition for the bit assignment and polarity
that should be defined ONLY in the .ini file.  The TkEMC
manual-mode functions do take their settings from the .ini file,
I have tested that.

I meant to check which version I'm running right now, I think it is
15-Mar-2000.  Does anyone ever remember this far back?

Sometime, I will have to get the latest version, because I really
want some of the newer features, but I can't have unreliability.

Thanks for your comments,

Jon