Well..... That Was Weird....

[HimyKabibble]

Today, I used my mill for the first time since early 2010 - Just making a simple fixture plate of 1/2" 6061.  A tiny bit of milling, and a bunch of drilling.  Halfway through peck drilling one of the holes, Mach3 spontaneously E-Stopped, leaving ALL FOUR DROs completely whacked - miles from their correct positions!  Never seen anything even remotely like that before!  Re-zeroed, and ran the rest of the program with no problems.

Regards,
Ray L.

[HimyKabibble]

I'm learning to hate Mach3 all over again....  When I last used this machine, about 18 months ago, it was working perfectly.  I used it yesterday with no significant problems.  Today.... nothing BUT problems!  When I first turned it on, I could not get continuous jog mode to work correctly - no matter what feedrate or FRO setting I specified, it ran at full G0 speed - 200IPM.  Nothing I did would get it to work.  Neither would it execute MDI moves.  Yet jogging otherwise worked fine.  Exited Mach3, re-started, and now it was working.  Later on, part-way through a program, it was peck-drilling.  After making a plunge, it decided to no longer move the Z axis (quill).  Naturally, this did not do the drill bit a whole lot of good.  Again, I exited, re-started, and picked up where I left off (with a new work-piece, since the first one was now ruined).  The jog problem re-occurred.  Re-booted the whole system, and tried again.  Now Z probing was not working!  The DROs would count, the Z servo would madke an unusual noise, but no servo faults, and the Z axis did not move.  Neither could I execute any MDI moves, again!  Yet I could jog all axes with no problems whatsoever!  Re-booted yet again, things seemed to be working, until late in the program, it decided to stop moving X/Y.  Again, no servo faults, no E-Stops, no indication of any problems.  At one point, I tried to jog X, and it moved Y AND Z instead!  At several points during the day, I found one or more (usually all) DROs totally whacked spontaneously.  In one case, they were reading completely bogus values, UNTIL I did a jog, at which point they all instantly snapped back to the right values!

Some days, it just doesn't pay to go out to the shop at all....

Regards,
Ray L.

[BR549]

Ray Now you know why my Mill lives on the Dark Side . 2+ years now and not even the first broken drill bit. It runs faultless and perfect every day and it is still on the same computer that I ran Mach3 on so that ruled out the Hardware from end to end. It is a software problem.

Been there done that one for years, (;-) TP

[ger21]

Probably a bad .xml?

[HimyKabibble]

Ray Now you know why my Mill lives on the Dark Side . 2+ years now and not even the first broken drill bit. It runs faultless and perfect every day and it is still on the same computer that I ran Mach3 on so that ruled out the Hardware from end to end. It is a software problem.

Been there done that one for years, (;-) TP

Terry,

But I haven't touched *anything* in the controller in 2.5 years, since I first built it....  I just swapped out the SmoothStepper, and it seems to be acting better now (hardly perfect, but better...) - at least I managed to get the parts made.  Though it did spontaneously FeedHold twice while running the program.  And, at one point it spontaneously re-set the Z DRO, mid-program, causing it to try drill a 1" deep hole 4" deep.  And at one point I set Single-Block mode, hit CycleStart, and it took off running the program, WHILE SingleBlock was blinking!  I really think I'm going to take a look at EMC....

Regards,
Ray L.

[BR549]

Ray just do it and never look back you will be a happy CNCer again. It is not the prettiest girl in town but by FAR it is the best cook.
 

(;-) TP

[HimyKabibble]

Ray just do it and never look back you will be a happy CNCer again. It is not the prettiest girl in town but by FAR it is the best cook.
 

(;-) TP

Terry,

My *only* two reservations are I've built a lot of "infrastructure" around Mach (LOTs of custom macros to automate common functions, custom touch-screen screenset, tool-length comp macros using the knee, etc.), and I'd have to give up my SmoothStepper, which means slowing my machine down considerably.   But I am going to give it a try.

Regards,
Ray L.

[BR549]

Ray(;-) I felt the same way at first as I have about 5years of cool mach functions and programs already developed BUT for the most part they are useless if the machine is not dependable (;-) I did a LOT of research looking for a dependable Low cost Control solution for the Small Job SHops.

It HAD to be stone dependable
It had to DO standard Gcode Functions, Subs and conditional a MUST
It had to do rigid tapping

The dark side has features that macheteers can only dream about.

I am not sure I understand the speed part How fast do you need a knee mill to go?

(;-) TP

[RICH]

my Mill lives on the Dark Side

Mine also  as it is collecting some dust from sitting idle, but, Mach never faults when fired up even after a long time.
I am not going to the dark side since we all know that the force there is evil. 
If you don't believe that then ask Yoda!

May the force be with you.....
RICH

[HimyKabibble]

Terry,

Actually, with EMC, I don't think speed would be an issue, and that was the primary reason for getting the SmoothStepper for Mach3.  I"m going to give EMC a try tomorrow - the CD is burning as we speak....

Regards,
Ray L.