Machsupport Forum
Mach Discussion => General Mach Discussion => Topic started by: 4lowie on January 29, 2015, 06:12:12 AM
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Hi all
I need to replace the drive motor on the cnc quilting machine i built for the wife, it doesn't have enough torque at the speed I need it to run.
What I'd like to do is use another stepper motor for the sewing machine and drive it from mach 3. I'm only using 2 axis at the moment so it would be easy to use the Z (or A) axis for this.
At the moment I do a M30 motor start to turn on the machine relay at the start of the sewing action, how do I turn on say the Z axis and leave it running until I send another motor stop command at the end of the process?
Thanks Dave
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You can't have continuous rotation on an axis (z) BUT you can on the spindle. Set up the spindle as step direction. Then use S********* to set the RPM and M3/4 to tun it ON /OFF.
(;-) TP
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Thanks TP
Little confused on this one..... so where do we set the parameters for the stepper motor thats effectively running the spindle?
On my router I use the spindle control to turn it off and on but thats a dedicated rotation type motor.
Thanks
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Go to Config / Spindle select S/D spindle
Go to Config Ports and pins/ Motor ouputs and set up the spindle.
Go to Config/ Motor tuning and set the steps per and Vel and Accel values (make sure you save)
Shut down Mach3 and reload Mach3.
(;-0 TP
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Thanks
After your first reply I went back and had a look and found those settings but which axis is it connected to!
As its a stepper surely it has to be connected to one of the 4 axis drives on my Gecko 540...
Cheers
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Do you have an empty drive on the 540 ? If so that is where you set the Port and pins to to run the stepper for the spindle.
If you are only running 3 drives and have an empty slot add in the extra drive and mapp the signals to that slot. If all your drives are already used then add a 2nd LPT card and run the spindle drive from there.
(;-)TP
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I see now.... So I've set the Step pin, Dir pin, Step port and Dir port the same as what shows for the unused Z axis which is what I'll use.
Can i set the S*** (whatever the code is) and the M03 command to auto populate from my vcarve tool path.
Do you have an example of this code?
Once again thanks for your help.
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To start teh spindle and set the speed.
M3 S100
S200 (Change the spindle rpm)
M5 (Stop the spindle)