22925
« on: June 20, 2008, 05:44:00 AM »
Few problems still with the SmoothStepper but nothing major and the problems are getting worked on an unlike the G100 I have every confidence they will be sorted soon. I have been involved with the SmoothStepper since the beginning and when I first got it there were a lot of problems, these were sorted quickly by Greg and I have been using the SS on my mill for 6 months now. I have put the Beta SS on a coil winding machine and one of the release versions is now on my mill.
Some of the problems are
1. noise if no breakout is used, Greg is working on digital filtering but small caps accross the Inputs should solve the problem if you are needing immediate resolution, if you use Breakout boards then the noise shouldnt be a problem as they will have filtering. This I believe is the reason Greg didnt have filtering on the SS as it would have meant there was double filtering.
2. SoftLimits dont work in the released PlugIn, I have tested a couple of beta plugins for Greg and they are getting very close to being perfect so my hopes are high this will be sorted very soon.
3. Spindle sync for Lathe threading is not done yet, think the last I heard Greg said it was 75% done but had hit a few snags. Dont worry about that though as Greg seems to be a master at getting round the problems and with Brian and Art on the Mach side of things they make a formidable team.
4. Backlash is not implemented, not sure on the status of this but think its a bit further down the list of things to do, once the above are sorted I think Greg will be working on that.
Might be a few other small bugs that you encounter with your specific machine but usually they can be sorted quickly just by slight configuration changes.
Overall the SS is a great product in my opinion and like Chris said above it will let machines move at the speeds they should without having to resort to electronic gearing.
Hood