Messages

6291

General Mach Discussion / Re: mach 3

« on: October 14, 2017, 04:42:19 PM »

Hi Dennis,
you Yanks are crazy...moan and whinge about the Chinese taking over the world and yet you buy their crap rather than supporting other
Americans making superb products in your back yard and who guarantee them.

Craig

6292

General Mach Discussion / Re: Stepper motors

« on: October 14, 2017, 04:33:14 PM »

Hi,
your machine looks pretty good and I would have guessed the steppers are adequate for the job.

Can you post your <profile>.xml, maybe we can spot a weakness or fault. You'll need to rename it to something like daxprofile.xml
and attach it to  a post with the Addition Options feature.

Craig

6293

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: How to use Home offset under mach configuration

« on: October 14, 2017, 04:23:09 PM »

Hi,
if you are doing this just to ensure that the part is within the boundaries you are making very very hard work of something which is
simple and already provided for.

If you reference your machine then soft limits become sensible. On the toolpath view the softlimits can be displayed and whether the part is within
the softlimit boundaries can be told at a glance. In addition on the Toolpath tab the current extents of the loaded Gcode program are detailed.
This information is repeated on the Program Extents tab of the DRO block on Machs main Program Run tab.

If the part is not within the boundaries you can manually jog until it is then <Zero X>, <Zero Y>, <Zero Z> and then <Regen Toolpath> and review
whether you shifted enuf and in the right direction. Easy!

What it relies on is that you can REFERENCE or HOME your machine. This requires good home switches at a minimum. Once upon a time it was the norm
to make limit switches double duty as home switches. With external motion controllers now having plenty of inputs to spare there is no need to do that
anymore. Three home switches, three inputs. Easy!

If you don't want to put home switches on your machine or think you cant afford them, I was exactly that way for quite a while, the go away
and use your machine. Once you've crashed it half a dozen or more times and broken all sorts of parts and thrown away wrecked jobs
left, right and centre then you will realise that good home switches are cheap.

Craig

6294

General Mach Discussion / Re: Stepper motors

« on: October 14, 2017, 03:46:42 PM »

Hi,
it sounds like you steppers are just operating at their maximum. Can you post some pics of your machine? I'm wondering if its so heavy
that in effect the steppers are to small. The speed and particularly the acceleration look very low, should be easy going for them.

There is still the possibility that the PC is intermittently stopping. It only needs to stop or pause for a few milli seconds and when it starts
again the motor has already slowed to the extent that it can't accelerate back to speed and therefore stalls with a squeal. Not quite
sure how to go about either proving or disproving that yet.

There was at one time a document floating around the forum that had a whole list (30-40 items) of things that you could set/disable/remove
from you PC to have it operate well under parallel port. Your PC is not a laptop is it? Parallel ports were always a bit picky about the PC.

One possibility is to get away from the parallel port altogether and use an external motion controller. They are very much more tolerant
of different PCs. It would of course require you buy another board. Good ones, don't go near the Chinese crap, start at $120. The ESS suchas
I have is $180. Does your budget allow for that sort of investment?

Craig

6295

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: writing modbus coils using LUA for Mach4? how?

« on: October 14, 2017, 03:27:36 PM »

Hi Mark,
glad to help.

Craig

6296

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: writing modbus coils using LUA for Mach4? how?

« on: October 14, 2017, 01:46:40 PM »

Hi,
and having frequency resolution to 0.01 Hz is useful why? Your spindle is asynchronous and the frequency displayed or
commanded is not the actual rpm anyway.

Craig

6297

G-Code, CAD, and CAM discussions / Re: Is "#100 = Z " a way to store the current Z axis setting ?

« on: October 14, 2017, 01:37:37 PM »

Hi,
yes that will work. Not at all sure that you should use pound variable #100 though. Pound variables are used extensively throughout Mach
and if you go writing different numbers into one which is used by Mach for some other purpose you'll crash.

If memory serves pound variables #500 thru to #600 are ok to use as you want.

6298

General Mach Discussion / Re: Stepper motors

« on: October 14, 2017, 01:31:25 PM »

Hi,
if you can't hang on to the motors they're getting too hot and you should reduce the current, a bit....say from 4A to 3A.
If they are not going above 50 degrees Centigrade then leave them alone.

That squeal is a stall. It doesn't sound great but it doesn't hurt the motor at all. From your description it sounds like the stall occurs when
the machine is instructed to move at G0 rate, ie maximum. Sounds like its struggling for acceleration.

What are your current velocity and acceleration settings?

Run DriverTest.exe and post a screen shot if possible.

Craig

6299

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: How to Modify Go To Work Zero

« on: October 14, 2017, 01:20:42 PM »

http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,35600.0.html

6300

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: How to use Home offset under mach configuration

« on: October 14, 2017, 01:11:42 PM »

Hi,
are points 1, 2 an 3 the maximum extent of your machine? The checking that you are doing is to ensure that the cut part is within the
machine boundaries?

Craig