Hello everyone,

I am working my way through a CNC lathe upgrade (the controls were nearly pre-DOS) and i am using the GRex and Mach3 to run things and i have most of it worked out however i can't work out how to set up the spindle in Mach. I have the X and Z axis working fine but i can't work out how to move the spindle.

The spindle is setup to run through a G320 the same as the other axes (The G320 happily holds it's position as expected with no spindle signal sent), i can't find a setting to tell the Grex which output channel (A,B or C) the spindle is on. In the spindle setup tab i have the step/dir enabled in the motor control group, In the motor outputs tab i have tried with just the spindle enabled, with just the axis the spindle is wired on enabled (A initally but i even rewired it to C after thinking i remembered reading this was important somewhere) and with both of these on.


Can anyone tell me what i'm doing wrong?

Thanks

Lost Tourist

You seem to be saying that you are running your spindle with a stepper motor or similar - requiring step and direction pulses.

The spindle does not share a channel - it has it's own output, which can be configured just like an axis.

If you look under Config/Ports and Pins/Motor Outputs, the bottom line is for the Spindle, which you can configure to the pins/output port etc you are using.

As you say, you can then set Step/Dir option in the Spindle Setup page.

Lost, I see what your saying. This is a good one. I will be thinking about this. At present I think you will have to do some VB magic to pull it off but I just woke up. 

Have you looked at the guide? I know it doesn't cover this but might be good for some hints.  http://www.machsupport.com/docs/G100_Set_Up_Guide_Rev.1_9-19-07.pdf

Brett

Brett - I will leave this one to you, having just browsed through the G100 set up notes. That's the trouble with hard wiring !!!

Three things came to mind.

1. I don't think the first is feasable - run the spindle step/dir through two of the other 16 output pins - I dont think it will be fast enough.
2. There must be an allocation table somewhere, to allocate the info from Mach 3 to the Ethernet transmitter. Can you not swap the allocation of say, axis C with the  step/dir of the Spindle Output.
3. Will Mach 3 run a second port when running the Ethernet. You would only need three wires to run a drive for the Spindle. I would hard wire this to a printer type lead and run it seperately.

Thanks for your thoughts so far. It's good to know I wasn't just overlooking something obvious.

I'm kind of hoping the solution is more number 2 than any of the others. I assume no one has tried this before?

Lost Tourist

Yes - There must be, to allocate the outputs to fixed outputs - unfortunately I am not privvy to that information.
Perhaps Brett can come up with something.

Dang guys, I'm sorry. I forgot about this one. Let me look at a couple of things. Please bump this topic if I don't post to it in a day or two.

Brett

Hi Guys:

  To use a step/dir spindle in a G100, turn on all axis in config/ports&pins except the C axis , and restart the program. The spindle will now be
the C axis. Set the port and pin of the C axis for the spindle output. Shoudl work fine then..

Art

Lost, please let me know how this works out. I will add this info. to the setup guide.

Brett