The way I like to connect my drives I/O up is have a short cable from the drive, shielded and preferably twisted pairs and have that going to breakout boards, you can then route from there to wherever they are going with the most suitable cable for the job. For encoders, analogue command etc I always use twisted pair, I have done some without shielding and it works fine but just short lengths and no where near anything noisy or mains voltage.

Hood

Looks like a simple wiring fault - CS-Labs replied and the shielding is wrong.

My pre-made cable idea has the shield connected to the DB25 shell - this is then grounded via the drive socket. CS reckon that the shield must be isolated at the drive and connected to the ground terminal on the encoder input terminal (25)

I will make up some proper cables when the wire arrives this week ( i ordered some 7-pair stuff) , that should fix it.

Had a reply from CS_Labs re the red flashing encoder numbers - they are not an error message, just a count of every error received from that encoder, it seems they only run from 1 to 255 though but any error is bad i guess so it spits out the "check encoder connection" message.

Good to know what that means Dave
Shielding can be weird, on most things you only want one end connected but on the Hiperface encoders that are on some motors if you do not have both ends of the shield connected they will not work, I found that out the hard way


Hood

Their diagram, which i had not seen before as its not in the manual shows all encoder screens connected to pin 25 on the encoder port.

I just been poking about with my trusty Fluke and I have inadvertently connected to encoder shields to mains earth at the drives - probably not the best method

Cable should be here tomorrow, bit of fiddly soldering and things should get better.

Still trying to find ideas for my semi-complex speed control method explained in my other thread

Ok, some success

I replaced the cabling with 7-pair shielded cables and the encoder error counts are now below 50, not zero but they do not seem to change plus i do not get that 'Check encoder connections...." message anymore.

Looks like the counts are only zeroed upon boot up and i only booted it once but at least it seems happy now.

Can't recall seeing any errors at all for the encoders on the Chiron,. maybe just didnt look. Is it on the debug page that you see them?

Hood

Nah, its on the Plugin Control -> CSMIO monitor screen

Ok so just on the General Info page of that rather than the debug page?
Hood

Yes the window that opens when you go Plugin Control -> CSMIO

On the left there are the encoder counts, if flashing red then an error was detected, the red number is the error count, it's limited to 255, at some level it triggers the "Check encoder connections..." message but i don't get that any more so maybe only when it hits 255 possibly.

I would guess an error could be a missing pulse or out of sync pulse?