I’m about to finish building a foot controller for the GYS PROTIG 201 and quickly wanted to share some information I couldn’t find anywhere else. More details on the foot pedal can be found here.

For a foot controller you have to use the connector on the back which is different from the connector on the front for your torch switch. GYS sells the connector separately but you can get the connector somewhere else for less. It’s a 7 pin MIL connector. I bought the Amphenol MIL MS3106F 16S-1P from ebay.

The manual of the welder provides a schematic for the pin connections. What it doesn’t provide is a value for the potentiometer. First I thought it wouldn’t matter much since it’s just a voltage divider. I built my pedal with a 500k potentiometer. The welder doesn’t recognize the pedal. When you plug in a pedal the welding machine should recognize a remote controller. It then flashes the options of using a pedal, a torch with potentiometer or no remote. None of that happened when I connected my pedal. I temporarily connected 200 Ohm potentiometer to check if it would recognize it. The machine did so I bought a potentiometer with the proper axle length. That was a mistake as it turned out. The resistance is way too low. The PROTIG provides 10V DC on pin A. With only 250 Ohm he burden is too big and the voltage breaks down. Thus the wiper contact won’t be able to reach 10V potential. To find out the allowable resistance range I connected a potentiometer between pins A and C (10V and GND). I turned the potentiometer until the welder recognized a remote. That’s the upper resistance limit. I did the same while measuring the voltage over the potentiometer. As soon as the voltage started dropping I measured the resistance value. The result is that the potentiometer should be between 5k and 15k Ohm. I ordered a 10k potentiometer and hope it will work finally.