Hey Martin,
the Satoer.com Control Panel in its current version does not support VFDs/spindles. It has an Emergency Stop that cuts power off to the entire installation that you have connected to the corresponding relay. Of course if you attached the VFD to it, it will be cut off from electricity too then. I described this mode above as Stop category 0.
And secondly the Satoer Control Panel has switches to power “on” and “off” the router or “auto” to let the router be powered on and off automatically by the ‘tool-enable’ function of the Onefinity Controller as described above. In this “auto” setting any occurence of a M3 command in the gcode program switches the router relay on, and a M5 command switches it off. This behaviour is similar to VFDs receiving M3 and M5 over ModBus/RS-485 by the gcode program.
But due to the way VFDs work, the Satoer Control Panel has no on/off/auto switches for a spindle driven by a VFD. Such on/off/auto switches are only there for routers/milling motors that are turned on to their running state by a switch. You could say, spindles are always on “auto”, they are controlled by gcode commands from the CNC controller.
I do not understand what you mean. Can you explain this better?
A Safety Relay wiring is shown here. In this case it shows only the VFD attached, but of course you can attach other devices that you want to put in a safe state in case of an Emergency Stop. E.g. you could trigger the CNC Controller “estopped” mode this way too, which would lead to the stepper motors being disabled.
The Safety relay can be triggered by a number of things, e.g. an Emergency Stop Button pressed, an Enclosure door opened, or other failures from devices. It is a question of what you want. And on its output side, the safety relay triggers an action, e.g. it can signal to the VFD that the spindle should be decelerated and put in STO (safe torque off) state.
It is imporant to understand that in fact you have different requirements to an Emergency Stop. First not every Stop mode is an Emergency Stop mode. You may want an Emergency Stop for cases of fire. In this case the Emergency Stop has to cut power from the entire installation on every phase immediately. This is because it is not a good idea to use a fire extinguisher on an installation that is under voltage. Risk assessments may require such a Stop category 0 triggered by an Emergency Switch in a location easily accessible in case of fire.
But you also want an Emergency Stop for the case that you want the spindle and the stepper motors to be stopped in a controlled way immediately, e.g. if there is a human that opened the enclosure, or e.g. in the case you see that you are destroying an expensive piece of wood with the wrong program, e.g. where it is more important that the stillstand is controlled by the device. This would not work if you have the power cut off. Therefore there exist other Stop modes.
Cutting off power from the whole installation is not the right way to do this in these cases, therefore there exist different EN 60204-1 Stop modes. Also not evevery Stop Mode is an Emergency Stop mode. Only modes 0 and 1 are recognised as Emergency Stop, because at the end they reach STO (Safe Torque Off).
The “estopped” mode of the Onefinity and Buildbotics Controller as mentioned here is a mode where certain things are stopped and disabled but the power stays on, therefore Buildbotics has the warning that the “estopped” mode is not recognised as Emergency Stop, but in many cases, this type of stop mode in practice is what you want. But the Controller should be wired to stop the router too (which is not the case with a stock Onefinity CNC), you have to wire it using the ‘tool-enable’ pin like explained in my posting above (which is the same way it is wired in “auto” mode of Satoer Control Panel). Or in case of using a spindle, the Safety Relay that stops the VFD can trigger the “estopped” mode of CNC Controller too.
So in fact in most cases will want to have both.