Intermittent E-stops

[bobmorey]

Hi All,
I have a new Novakon NM200 that I have experienced two intermittent sudden E-stops and two sudden loss of power to the motors and spindle.  The NM200 has a Vista or 7 PC as the OS.  I run two other machines on Win XP and never experience this problem.  Two Estops had the message "Driver Watchdog triggered".  The machine is equipped with limit switches but I do not use them, nor was the table near the switches.  Also the motors were not being taxed at all when the E stops occurred (1 during retract, the other machining foam).  The two power downs did occurr while machining, the motors and spindle just stopped and I had to power down the pc completely to reset everything.  A real pain when machining a 3 hour part.

Novakon suggested uninstalling Mach3 which I did and installing the latest version (3.043.022).  But the sudden E-stops started happening. 

For now I dissabled the limit switches in pins/ports because I don't really need them, I also unchecked the "enable driver watchdog". 

BTW what is "Driver watchdog" and why would I want it?  What driver is it watching?

Any other troubleshooting suggestions? 

Thanks, Bob

[BR549]

Turn OFF the watchdog it is not needed.

(;-)TP

[bobmorey]

Thanks, what is "driver watchdog"? -Bob

[BR549]

The watch dog is an enternal monitor that keeps a watch on things. On some systems it is TOO sensitive and will trip on things that do not effect Mach3 running properly.

(;-) TP

[bobmorey]

Thank you for the reply.  Hopefully dissabling the watchdog will help.