Machsupport Forum
Mach Discussion => General Mach Discussion => Topic started by: Bertus on August 15, 2008, 07:43:47 AM
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Hi
We are having a problem where the machine looses it's coordinates during operation. After a run of the program it is normally out by 1mm
in both the X & Y axis. This also varies in magnitude aswell as direction. Is there something that needs to be calibrated ?
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Sounds like you could be loosing steps, turn down the acell and velocity a bit on each axis and see if that helps. Also check for binding ways or dirty ballscrews.
If none of that checks out please let us know what kind of machine, type or motors and drives and other hardware you are using.
Hood
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Hi
I disabled a surveilance system wich was running on the same computer and found better results , But when I slowed the machine down to half the speed of wich it was running at , the deviatiation was much worse.
We're running on XP 2002 with a Pentium 4 CPU @ 3.00GHz and it's got 1 Gig RAM. The stepper motors are from Motion King ,
Model Nr. : 23HS0405
What about a network connection ? Could that be a problem ?
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Shouldnt be but anything is possible. Just try deleting everything or stop them running to see irf you can find the problem. If you have Apples Quicktime get rid of that as it is notorious for causing havoc with Mach engine.
Hood
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Hi
Turned off just about everything. But if anything the problem has just got worst.
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Have you run the driver test to see how the pulse looks?
Have you tried the optimisation steps detailed on the downloads page?
Hood
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Where do I find the driver test ? I'm a bit new to this program.
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Drivertest.exe should be in the Mach3 folder on your drive, make sure Mach is not running when you try it.
Hood
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I've done the Driver Test , but the machine is still loosing coordinates.
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What does the driver test look like? if its nice and smooth then fine, if its jumping all over the place with big peaks then its not so good.
Hood
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I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking at there , but it does seem to jump around a bit and I have seen some noisy bits. If there is a problem with the driver , how could this be resolved ?
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If the line is jumping around with pretty large peaks then that may well be your problem, the only thing you can try is the optimisation stepsdetailed at the bottom of the downloads page.
Hood
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Hi
Since our last disgussion , we have decided to move the milling machine to another computer ( computer #2 ) wich are not that busy , but now we have other problems. On the new computer the software is not fully functional. You are able to load GCode and so forth , But the program does not want to run the GCode, nor does it respond to jogging commands . Upon loading the software onto computer #3 , everything seems to be working fine , although we'd like to get the software working on computer #2.
Computer #2 is running at 1.7GHz and has got 736 Mb of RAM. We have never used this computer's LPT1 and I'm wandering what effect
a fualty printer port might have on Mach 3 operation. We havn't got anything else to test the printer port with.