Messages

1

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 not communicating with cnc machine....

« on: April 30, 2013, 02:29:06 AM »

OK.  So switching the Step and Dir Ports to 1 fixed half of it...  the low voltage problem was fixed by switching Step Low Active to on.

Good thing too...  Since I wasn't able to find anywhere where it tells me what voltage my breakout board was specced for.

I wasn't able to find anywhere that even mentioned it except one troubleshooting page over on buildyourcnc.com that mentions that if your voltages are low to set the Step Low Active to on.

I mention it mostly because I see lots of threads that end with "Oh, I see what it was...  I fixed it..."  with no mention of what the fix was or where it was at.

http://xkcd.com/979/

2

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 not communicating with cnc machine....

« on: April 27, 2013, 04:33:03 PM »

So I set the Motor Outputs to 1 (Makes sense... ), Still getting no motion.

Voltages remain at .5 across the board, unless moving in the negative direction of any axis.  Then I get a voltage read of 3+ on either the 3, 5 or 7 pin.

So that is progress.  Also... when the cable is hooked up to the cnc machine, the motors give a satisfying thunk when everything powers up.  So again, good feelings.  and getting voltage out of the board that is consistent with what I am getting from the cable..

But still no motion.  Attached current xml.

Thanks for your patience.

3

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 not communicating with cnc machine....

« on: April 26, 2013, 10:03:49 PM »

Thanks.

Well, The LPT port is right in the correct range, so that is one mystery solved...  (Kinda...)

My Cable is connected to an onboard parallel port.  No add on...

I have attached my xml.

Any info is good info.

Thanks again.

4

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach3 not communicating with cnc machine....

« on: April 26, 2013, 06:10:39 PM »

And, yes...  I did set the Motor Outputs for the XY and Z axis to on, assigned them Step Pins 2, 4 and 6, and set their Dir Pins to 3, 5 and 7.

5

General Mach Discussion / Mach3 not communicating with cnc machine....

« on: April 26, 2013, 06:02:02 PM »

I have a diy machine that I built from the apress book that is out there...  and now that I am in the home stretch I am having some issues that I cannot quite resolve on my own.

I am using a refurbished Dell running 32 bit win 7, and for whatever reason Mach3 will not send out a signal to the parallel port.

I hooked the pins of the cable up to a multi-meter and am getting a constant of .5 volts coming out of all of the output pins.  I tested it with a diagnostics program (LPT Debug) and was able to get a 3+ volt reading when the flag for a given output pin was set to on.

LPTDebug was using a port labeled LPT1(378h).  Since the port address under the Ports and Pins Config tab labeled Port Setup and Axis Selection is set for the default (0x378) and is set to Port Enabled, I am guessing that those are referring to the same address...

Also confusing is that when I check the COM1 Port settings in Win7, It shows an I/O range of 03F8 - 03FF.  So using that range, I would think that nothing using 0378 should be able to get to the parallel port.  

Setting the Port#1 address in Mach 3 to 0x3F8 doesn't change anything either.  I an not sure if that is surprising or not, since LPTDebug is using what I believe is the same port address and getting through just fine.

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Someone in one post suggested trying a program called MachProfile to verify that everything was working properly, but when I use it to load my Mach3 profile, it just shows me what appears to be an empty spreadsheet.

So I am stumped.

Another noob with more noob problems, I know.  but I cant figure out why this wouldn't be giving me somthing in terms of output.

A little help..?  Thanks.