Machsupport Forum
Mach Discussion => General Mach Discussion => Topic started by: ranchak on September 25, 2010, 01:23:15 PM
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I installed a parallel port card and I can not get Mach to communicate with my machine. I took some pics of my driver setting in Windows, anybody see anything wrong?
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You have attached three xmls one for turn, one for plasma and another for screen4
Have you set the correct port address?
Hood
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Sorry Hood, how about this one?
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I don’t know if this will help you but when I was trying to get Mach3 to communicate with a Gecko G540 based controller system it would not work because the parallel port was not in EPP mode. You have to boot into the computer’s bios to change this.
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Are you sure you have the correct port address set?
Hood
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Hood, I'm not sure I have the correct port address assigned. Do you see something that verifies this?
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Not really but its the only thing I can think of, your xml looks fine apart from Pin 16 being both spindle Step and Dir and also OutPut 1. I am sure I mentioned that to you before and you said that was the way it was meant to be with your spindle hardware, so its not a problem. Even if it was wrong it should not stop you getting movement on the axis.
If you go to device manager then Ports and look at your PCI cards resources tab is the address cc00?
Hood
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Yes, here is the screenshot
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That seems to be a shortcut to the pic on your computer so afraid I cant look at it.
If the port address is correct then what I would do is take the cable off the back of the computer and put a volt meter between the Dir pin of the X axis and Gnd on the port itself then Jog the X one way then the other. If you see the voltage change between 0v and 5v you will know Mach is outputting and your problem is possibly cable or even further out.
Hood
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I'm pretty sure that my problem is the parallel port card. If I install my old computer the machine works. I think there is something up with the address or the fact that it is an ECP port?
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Can you change it to EPP?
Hood
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I can't find anywhere in the CMOS to change to EPP. This is getting to be a serious pain in the ass. I guess tomorrow I'll take it in and see if the experts can fix it. I'll also change out the RAM in my old PC and see if that makes a difference.
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You wont find it in the BIOS if its a PCI card, Your only options may be in the device manager or possibly a jumper on the card itself.
Hood
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did you install the driver?
also look in the device manager and see what info is there.
what make card?
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did you install the driver?
Yes
also look in the device manager and see what info is there.
Parallel Port addres is cc00
what make card?
Best Connectivity PCI Express
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I wonder if it is that I am running a 64 bit version of Vista????
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Thats it for sure, Mach will not run under 64bit versions unless you are using an external pulsing device such as SmoothStepper, DSPMC, Galil etc etc.
Hood
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Wow, can't believe it took me this long to catch that. Hopefully I can get X loaded and see if we can make some progress today. I'll keep you posted.
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Well I couldn't get my version of XP to load. I went out and got a used PC and I'm back at making chips. This PC is running XP, one thing I noticed and I also noticed this on my other PC with XP is that when you load a program into Mach the Reset button doesn't flash. It did when running under Vista. Is this normal?