Hi,
I don't believe Mach4 is capable of helping the non-programmer which really sucks.
Rubbish, Mach4 is ready to rock for all basic machines, no programming required. You do need to turn on or off a couple of features but that's it. You can be making chips in under an hour.
Homing in Mach4 behaves exactly like Homing in Mach3.
I really would have thought the basics would have stayed the same like backing off a switch.
That was NEVER in Mach3, certainly at the beginning, and it is still not in Mach3 per se but in the motion controller....and always has been. Whats happening here is that you have
become accustomed to the features of Mach3 which have sought of evolved....and imagine that they are standard features....they are not. Now you have to actually understand how they
work and replicate that behaviour in Mach4 and given you do not understand how it was done in Mach3 makes it tricky. Its not that Mach4 is hard just that Mach3 had a lot of funny
work-around features which should probably never have been there.
The people whom struggle with Mach4 are those with a long history of Mach3. They seem to imagine the shortcuts, work-arounds and downright bugs in Mach are the 'standard' way of
doing things or worse the only way of doing things...they are not. Mach4 is and was purposely designed to be as close to identical as possible to Fanuc 21i, being as close to an industry standard
as there is. Mach4 can be made to do all the things that Mac3 could and many many more, but whats really important is that it conform to Fanuc21i right from the get go out of the box.
All the frilly bits can be added later.
When I first stared with Mach4, I had within a few months programmed a lot of features that replicated what Mach3 had....but over a period of time they have all disappeared.
In the end I decided they added little or nothing....so the only custom parts to my current Mach4 installation are actually things I use and are productive for me. Anything
else is just wasting time when I should be getting on with the paying work.
I can't even get the Jog button to jog the freaking gantry .010" increments. The green light comes on but it still runs full tilt.
Have you filled out the jog increments on the Control Plugin page? It sounds like you are suffering from after-run which is where the 'clicks' or increments accumulate faster than the
machine can consume them and therefore they get 'saved' up and will carry on even once you stop jogging. This is a common fault, and used to happen in Mach3 in exactly the same
way and for exactly the same reason. It turns out the machine is doing exactly what you tell it to do.....but your settings have made after-run that much more likely.
There are a couple of threads on the Mach4 board that deal with exactly this and there is a thread on the Warp9TD forum that deals with it also.
What board do you use to supply all those inputs?
I made my own. Its not that dissimilar to an MB3 by CNCRoom. All three ports are fully developed, all 24V tolerant. All Step/Dir outputs (12 of them) are differential.
Has a 24VDC output for the Z axis brake, a built-in high linearity PWM to analog converter and ON/OFF relay for a VFD driven spindle.
Note that my breakout board has eight pin sockets down the lower side, one plug for each axis servo, all of them X,Y,Z,A,B and C....and yes I have a C axis, that is an angular position
capable spindle that allows me to do rigid tapping.
Craig