Probe Z on steel table, vice & part

[Aiph5u (Aiph5u (not affiliated with Onefinity))]

Hey AntMan,

@AntMan

Also, should the console completely shut off when I push the emergency stop… what should happen?

This depends on which estop button yo mean, the virtual on the display, or the red button on the controller box.

If you mean the red/yellow symbol on the top right corner of your display, then you enter the “estopped” mode. All motors are stopped, including the spindle (if it is correctly connected to the controller, it is put in Safe Torque Off mode) or a router (if it is controlled by a relay on 'tool-enable" function (via pin 15 of 25-pin I/O port)).

Unfortunately, on the buildbotics.com derived Onefinity Controller, when entering the “estopped” mode this way, your program is stopped and cannot be resumed, and all positions and offsets are lost (however you can find and re-create them in the log file).

On the other hand if you mean pressing the big red mushroom-shaped button on the black Onefinity Controller box, then only one thing happens: The power to the Raspberry Pi 3B and the AVR mainboard including the stepper motor drivers inside the Onefinity Controller is suddenly cut. The stepper motors become powerless, but if no special precautions are taken, the spindle and the router continue to run. If you have a Z axis with a spindle that comes down with gravity when stepper is made powerless, you have a nice hole in your workpiece or table since the spindle still runs.

@Aiph5u

As Onefinity stated here (and can very well be seen here), their Hardware Emergency Stop button is not wired to the “estop” input of the mainboard, but interrupts power to the entire controller at the internal power supply instead. Therefore it is not advisable to use this big red E-Stop button on the controller’s case AT ALL, for the reasons explained here .

So when assembling your setup, it is the ideal opportunity to wire a big red emergency button in a way that it really triggers the Controller’s ESTOPPED mode with the benefit that router or spindle are stopped too (which would not be the case if you only lengthen the wires to which the red button is now connected).

How to connect the red button so that it triggers the emergency stopped mode of the controller is described here.

But this is still a very simply way to implement a safety stop. If you want to know how a real safety circuit works in the industry when using a VFD and a spindle, see here.

If you want to know more about Emergency Stop Categories see here and here.

@AntMan

Also, my console does not ever shut down completely… it just hangs… forever… I have to actually unplug it from mains to shut down… is this normal?

One of the causes why this can happen is when the controller has its power off, but is backfed with a 5 V voltage from the touch display via a USB port. It then reboots after shutdown again, but the power it receives this way is not enough to start the entire system so it leads to a system error with kernel panic. You can avoid this with a piece of hardware that prevents a 5 V voltage from attached USB peripheral devices to be backfed to the Onefinity controller. See here for more information:

• Proper Shutdown on the Onefinity CNC