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« on: February 25, 2019, 07:16:37 AM »
I have just been contacted by a Mach3 user in The Netherlands who does not like to post here because he says that he does not have good English. Well: Zijn Engels is een stuk beter dan mijn Nederlands.
He uses a Chinese motion controller which will output spindle PWM but it does not support the M11/M10 command set and up till now he has just been using an imaginary Axis Direction pin to switch his laser ON/OFF and controlling output power manually.
He has now tried the gating concept shown in post #1067 and he discovered it has an unexpected benefit…
For a while, a few years back when the M11/M10 command set was broken, I used the B axis direction pin to switch my laser ON/OFF – although this worked just fine EStop would not automatically turn the laser OFF and this really did represent a fire hazard.
Because Mach3 allows all Outputs to be switched OFF upon EStop (and this includes the PWM signal) gating an Axis Direction signal with PWM will always switch the laser OFF when an M5 or M30 or EStop is encountered. Brilliant.
This is something I had not considered – thanks Joost for the heads-up on this one (we never stop learning).
Tweakie.