Machsupport Forum
Mach Discussion => Mach4 General Discussion => Topic started by: mcardoso on March 12, 2019, 08:58:44 PM
-
I purchased a 4 axis universal (15 wire pigtail) pendant off of ebay for $50. I have been working with Andy at Warp9TD (Smoothstepper) to get it working with Mach 4.
I won't bother to recreate the instructions, Andy at Warp9TD did a great job here (https://warp9td.com/index.php/faq/faq-pendants-and-mpgs#WireAMultiWirePendant). The things that tripped me up were the counts per detent = 4, and I incorrectly mapped the MPG to ESS Encoder 0 instead of Encoder Aux 0. Once that last one was corrected it worked perfectly.
I haven't had a chance to use it in practice yet, but I expect it will be in my top 3 favorite changes to this machine. In the past I found edge finding to be a huge chore, this will save me so much time.
Following the instructions, I set the velocity and acceleration to 100%. This nearly shook the paint off of the walls when jogging in .01 steps due to the outrageous acceleration on my machine's servos. I found 10% acceleration was snappy but much smoother, I might even go less. There is a small but still noticeable delay (might only be a few dozen milliseconds) from the click of the MPG to motion on the axis. I don't find it annoying as it is only noticeable when moving single steps, but it is present. My step settings are .0001, .001, and .01 which corresponds to (very roughly) 1, 10, and 100ipm respectively when the wheel is spun at a quick clip
In the 3 axis mach profile, I will map the 4th axis on the pendant to the spindle. In my 4 axis profile, it will jog the rotary table.