Machsupport Forum
Mach Discussion => Mach4 General Discussion => Topic started by: kowy82 on November 18, 2020, 05:28:21 AM
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Hello everybody
Please help...
i have Mach4 + Ethernet SmoothStepper and i need set this:
one motor for axis X
two motors for axis Y
four motors for axis Z
one motor for axis A
one motor for axis B
each motor for axis X,Y,Z must have self homeswitch
The problem is that mach4 only offers me eight motors, but i need nine.
Does anyone have any idea?
Thank you
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Hi,
The problem is that mach4 only offers me eight motors, but i need nine.
That is not correct.
Mach4 has six simultaneously coordinated motors (motors 0 through 5) and six Out-of-Band motors (motors 6 through 11).
Each may have up to five slave motors, thus you could have up to 36 simultaneously coordinated motors.
Despite the potential number of motors defined, Mach4 has somewhat more limited ability than the theoretical potential:
having 32 home signals, 32 ++limits and 32--limits. None-the-less you can have up to 32 motors with individual homes and limits,
more than enough!!.
I suspect the bottleneck will be the ESS, its going to run out of IO before Mach4 will.
Lets do a count up of the required IO:
nine motors each with one step and one direction signal =18 IOs
nine home switches=9 IOs
one Estop=1 IO
one drive enable (commoned to all motor drives)=1 IO
one limit input per axis=5 IOs
TOTAL IOs=34. So the ESS should be OK (having 51 IO's)
There may be a restriction of the number of motors the ESS can address, I'm not near my machine PC to confirm
at the moment.
Craig
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the y axiss if its gantry and you use 2 (master and slave)
i give you my advise,use it as one motor and connect both to one just in driver one is opsite
its avoid many other problems with the master slave