Messages

741

General Mach Discussion / Re: G83 Random Bug

« on: August 09, 2013, 05:51:11 PM »

Hi Rufan

I found it advisable to always include the X & Y coordinates in the g83 instruction even if I had previously moved to the right XY position. Sometimes Mach seemed to forget where it was if many subroutine layers were involved. Of course, sometimes the g83 worked fine without the X & y parameters ...  I do a lot of air cutting first.

Cheers

742

Machscreen Screen Designer / Re: MachScreen releases

« on: August 03, 2013, 05:49:27 AM »

Thank you Klaus

Cheers
Roger Caffin

743

General Mach Discussion / Re: My retrofit nightmare

« on: May 14, 2013, 05:34:25 PM »

Did I do that right, or did I create a ground loop?

If they all come to one central point withOUT connections at the far ends to make loops, that's good.

On grounding3.jpg I show 2 snap on ferrite noise suppressors. Is it good to have them?

Put ferriter noise suppressors on power leads (eg to DC motors), but NOT on any ground leads. Make the ground leads as short as is reasonably possible, and of heavy wire. If you have 2 wires to a motor, twist them together, ditto even for +5V power to a PCB.

Your wiring does look a bit messy. Try to tidy it up but keep power wires separate from signal wires, in different bundles. No, dressing the power wires together is not just 'pretties', it does help.

Cheers

744

General Mach Discussion / Re: My retrofit nightmare

« on: May 11, 2013, 06:00:44 PM »

I thought the purpose of the the e-stop is to cut off all power in an emergency.

Hood is right: you want the eStop to remove power from the motors so they do no harm.

what will happen to the ESS if I hit the e-stop.

The ESS will lose all its programming and it's connection to the computer, and you will have to (basically) stop and restart Mach before you can get the machine to do anything useful.

Cheers

745

General Mach Discussion / Re: My retrofit nightmare

« on: May 11, 2013, 02:47:22 AM »

Hi

I note that you have an eStop breaker on the mains input. Now this may look fine on paper, BUT it is going to create unholy strife for you. For a start, hitting eStop will mean the ESS will lose power. NOT GOOD!

Most power amplifiers have an Enable input. This is where you put the eStop signal. Also, most PAs have a Fault output. You should collect all the Fault signals and OR them together to drive a flip-flop. The flip-flop output should go to the Enables and to Mach. You will need a reset button to clear the flip-flop. A LED or a light off the flip-flop is almost mandatory so you can see when the hardware has faulted. You also need to be able to see the LEDs on the PAs, so you can see which one faulted.

Cheers

746

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach 3 axis moving after exit/estop

« on: May 03, 2013, 09:03:11 PM »

My machine seems to work fine, but when I press the reset button or exit mach 3 the x axis continues moving while in e-stop mode. Is this a hardware issue or software?

Hardware thru&thru imho.
Sounds as though your hardware is turning off the outputs of the optical BoB, so the Step lines into the motor driver(s) go into a high-Z state and are flailing in the breeze. Noise pickup is making the drivers turn the motor(s).
One cure is to require an active Enable into the drivers. The keep-alive pulse-train is often used for this.
Another cure is to put some moderately low impedance pull-ups onto the lines so they go inot one known state at power-off.

Cheers

747

General Mach Discussion / Re: Gaining .0001 steps

« on: May 03, 2013, 08:57:16 PM »

This only helped until I rebooted Mach3 then it went back to missing steps when direction is changed.

Not a new problem.
It sticks in my memory that the problem was happening when the DIR line changed state. If the STEP line had the wrong Active state then there appeared tto be one extra pulse happening in ONE direction. So setting the lines to Active High did solve the problem for a while - until the reboot.

Question: did you save the config before rebooting? If not, you may have wiped out the change in the config (the XML file) to Active-High.

Cheers

748

General Mach Discussion / Re: Vital Reboot/Blue screen of death

« on: April 14, 2013, 07:03:02 PM »

It's an old hand-me-down with some pretty good specs. I've been weeding hundreds of junk programs out of it and may have deleted some system files. I guess I'll format the hard drive and start over with either XP or W2000. Mach runs really nicely on W2000.

BSD suggests you had deleted some system files OR had deleted something without updating the Registry.
A lesser possibility is that there was a virus or rootkit in there, deleted by the wipe and clean install.

Cheers

749

General Mach Discussion / Re: Text wizard/engraving issues

« on: April 14, 2013, 06:44:06 AM »

Looks like a purely mechanical engineering problem to me. Backlash on the Y axis maybe.

Cheers

750

General Mach Discussion / Re: Can Mach3 run a cable robot system?

« on: April 14, 2013, 06:36:13 AM »

Mach3 CAN do this in principle, but is definitely very poorly matched to the job. The problem is that the structure you are trying to control has considerable dynamics and inertia to cope with, and Mach3 has zero ability to handle the momentum calculations. Mach3 is for CNC; what you want is software for a robot.

It may work if you run slowly with very low acceleration.

Cheers