Messages

1

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors not Turnining...

« on: December 01, 2008, 03:29:29 PM »

Chris D from MaxNC read my xml file and found a setting that was incorrectly set. But the biggest issue was an obscure and hidden reset button that tripped!  Everything's working now! Thanks everyone for the help and advice. I'll send some pictures of some of the students' work next.

Whew! And the semester is almost over. Just in time!

Larry

2

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors not Turnining...

« on: November 30, 2008, 11:23:04 AM »

I had asked Hood, offline, about how to check output voltages to the motors when the limit switches kept tripping. We thought we might have worked around this by disabling the switches in Mach 3. Hood offered the following suggestion:

"If you have NC switches on them and you remove them they will trip, what you will need to do is put jumper wires from the dedicated limit connections to the dedicated common terminal."

Hood - we're back in school tomorrow (Monday) and want to get back on this. What are "NC" switches and how can we determine if that's what we have? Do we jump between connections on the parallel plug?

There's very little information available for this MaxNC Router. I've written them asking for more info but I'm not optimistic. Here's info off their website: http://maxnc.com/maxpath_42.htm

We appreciate, so much, everyone's help and patience.

Larry

3

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors not Turnining...

« on: November 27, 2008, 12:27:11 AM »

Chip,
School is closed until Monday and I'm out of town. But I'll go in as soon as I get back and try to get some pictures. We don't have much in the way of documentation. How can I tell if the motors are stepper or servo? And when you asked, "In Config, Ports & Pins, Output's Page, No pin's selected. " were you reading our XML?
Hood,
Of course you wouldn't want that manual! I don't know what I was thinking! I was rushing out of town and grabbed the only manual we have. MaxNC didn't provide any documentation. I'll email them right now to see if anything is available.

thanks everyone,
Larry

4

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors not Turnining...

« on: November 26, 2008, 03:47:04 PM »

Hood asked for the pdf manual. It is attached.

Chip: your suggestions seem very important and we'll test them next opportunity.. Thanks.

5

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors not Turnining...

« on: November 26, 2008, 01:01:50 PM »

We had to disable the limit switches since once we unplugged the router the Reset switch tripped. Once this was done we checked voltage between pins 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (the motor output pins as specified by MaxNC) against pin 25 on the computer's female parallel port. We did this while jogging x, y, and z in Mach 3. We never got any voltage anywhere. I assume this means the internals of the port are faulty, eh?

Larry

6

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors not Turnining...

« on: November 25, 2008, 06:52:35 PM »

There's two MaxNC options there and we tried both, as well as neither. No motor action in any case....

Say Hood (or anyone), which pin is ground?

Larry

7

General Mach Discussion / Re: Motors not Turnining...

« on: November 25, 2008, 06:09:45 PM »

Thanks Hood,
I'll bring in a volt meter tomorrow and we'll run your tests.

In the meantime, here's our XML file..
thanks all,
Larry

8

General Mach Discussion / Motors not Turnining...

« on: November 25, 2008, 05:08:10 PM »

OK. We've tried everything. We've got a MaxNC Router hooked up to Mach 3. They're talking; if we manually trip a limit switch, we see the led light up on Mach 3, but there's no motor response. We've tried everything mentioned in the troubleshooting video: port 378 is good, X, Y, and Z are turned on with the pin settings from MaxNC. Incidentally,  our driver test looks very good.

We are a small high school just starting out with CAD so please explain things 'slowly'!

Larry

9

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 compatible with XP, Service Pack 3?

« on: November 24, 2008, 12:07:07 PM »

We can't get the motors to run and we're also getting a lot of noise when we run the driver test. We're working through some troubleshooting and will report results later today. For now we just wanted to confirm the compliance with Service Pack 3.
thanks Hood,
Larry

10

General Mach Discussion / Mach3 compatible with XP, Service Pack 3?

« on: November 24, 2008, 11:12:02 AM »

We've got some interface connectivity problems between Mach3 and our router and want to make sure it's not an OS issue. We assume Mach3 is compatible with Windows XP, Service Pack 3, right?

thanks,
Larry