Hi,
welcome. Mach4 does have some challenges that put a few people off. On the other hand those who stick with it become very keen, if you
stick around you'll find that I am very keen, rabidly so!
Both the ESS and the 540 are good pieces of gear, I would guess a setup fault rather than hardware failure.
Have you got an Estop button wired to the 540? If so does operating the Estop cause Mach4 to go into Estop as well?
I'm thinking that the ESS is not communicating with the 540, possibly charge pump or enable or something like that.
If the Estop trick doesn't reveal anything useful can you probe the DIR pins of the ESS?
Can you post a screen shot of your ESS pin assignments? Also a shot of your motor outputs?
When I first started with Mach4 I too used the ESS and I found it quite confusing to start with, there seemed to be some things you set up in the ESS plugin
but others had to be done in the Mach plugin.
The general rule is set everything up in the ESS plugin. Setup changes you make there will be automatically updated in the Mach plugin as well. If, in your
confusion, you go and change something in the Mach plugin the settings for the same item could be different in the two plugins and Mach can be excused for not
working under those circumstances.
In the first instance keep your setup as simple as you can...no limit or home switches. On the ESS inputs page you should have, at least to start with,
the Estop enabled only. Again to start with try just having Motor0 Step and Dir enabled and all other outputs disabled.
If you try such a cutdown setup you should be able to experiment with either/or charge pump or Enable signals to determine the right combination.
Craig