Enable Axis function

[wade75]

I am trying to control 4 axis system, however When I try to enable an axis using the enable axis.flx the disabled light on the UMI 7774 for the particular axis does not go out so I am assuming that the axis is not enabling.  I can Control the axis and get the servo motor to work in MAX, but that doesn't show me the sequence of events to enable the axis.  MAX just does it under the hood I assume.  I have looked through the NI Motion Examples and haven't found one that explains how to enable an Axis through programming.  I will continue to hammer away at it, though some help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

         Wade

[Jochen]

Hi Wade,

the initialization routine in MAX is quite sophisticated and it uses some low level functions, that are not available in the user API. If there is no compellent reason for doing the initialization programmatically, I strongly recommend using MAX. This will save a lot of your time.

Could you please tell us, why you think, you need to initialize the board programmatically?

Thanks,

Jochen

[wade75]

Jochen,

            I am designing a user interface for controlling 4 seperate axis.  This program also does some analysis, error checking, and data aquisition from stain gauges and encoders.  The method I am using is the contouring method, an continually feeding the write buffer in a loop.  I can initialize the controller and axis and everything I just can't seem to get the disabled axis light to go out on the UMI 7774.  I assume that the enable axis.flx API was supposed to do this.  I even tried an advanced motion IO write and tried to send a drive ready enable command but that also didnt' work.  I had our Local NI Rep in here yesterday, and he was on the phone with one of NI's Application Engineers and had gotten MAX setup to communicate with the drives.  However I didn't get a chance to inquire why my application would not enable the drive.

[Jochen]

Hi Wade,

could you please post your initialization code? Maybe I can find the reason for the issue. Just to make sure: Does the status of the enable LED change, when you initialize the board in MAX?

Thanks,

Jochen

[wade75]

Jochen,

            I was able to debug my app.  I was missing the initialize api in my sequence.  I was playing out all the other VI's but was missing the initialize.  Also it looks like the LED on the UMI board actually goes out with the initialize command and not the enable axis command.

Thanks

            Wade

[Jochen]

Hi Wade,

thank you for this clarification. Obviously I have misunderstood you. As you were referring to enable axis, I have anticipated, that you want to set all configuration parameters programmatically instead of using MAX to configure your board and the initialize function to download this configuration in your program.

Enable Axis sets only one of a whole bunch of parameters that are required to configure the axis and it's part of the MAX configuration:

I hope this makes things clearer.

Kind regards,

Jochen