Messages

1

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Pressing Stop button during move loses position

« on: May 17, 2021, 12:57:23 PM »

Striplar,

I have been using Mach since Mach2.
It has always been a hard stop with the Stop button.
If you wanted a controlled stop in Mach2 or Mach3 you needed to Feedhold then Stop.
Always been that way.
I did see when changing to Mach4 that under Configure/Control then the General Tab there is a "Cycle Stop is Controlled Stop".
I have not checked it and have no idea how it works but that might be what you want.

Bill

Thanks, I'll take a look. It's going to be academic soon though, because I'm moving over to KMotionCNC. There are just too many issues with this new release that aren't being taken seriously.

2

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Pressing Stop button during move loses position

« on: May 17, 2021, 12:55:23 PM »

Mach software Engineers have clearly talked to Warp about the ESS, else they couldn't have created a plugin. It's no big deal for them to fix a simple problem like this if they're inclined to. However, if their response is anything like it has been to the 'Single Block' bug that I've been trying to get fixed for months, it might be something that never gets addressed.

https://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=44675.msg286280#msg286280

I probably won't be posting anything about Dynamotion here. There's a Forum dedicated to that, and people can go there if they're dissatisfied with Mach.

3

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Pressing Stop button during move loses position

« on: May 17, 2021, 06:13:29 AM »

I think anyone reading your responses would conclude that you're associated with Mach and speak on their behalf.

Mach4 knows where it is at all times. Even if the planner has to be interrupted, Mach4 will still know what it has sent as a request to the ESS. Mach4 and the ESS are synchronised in as much as they both agree what commands have been sent.
Once Mach4 stops sending commands, it knows what it has sent to the ESS. The ESS knows this too. The ESS may not have output all of the Steps necessary to complete that command, but it DOES know how many it has output. Therefore it can go back to Mach4 and tell it that out of 2000 pulses that were requested, it only output 1000. Simple.

As long as the ESS can communicate back to Mach4, it's easy enough. You can't solve it in real time, but you don't need to.

4

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Pressing Stop button during move loses position

« on: May 17, 2021, 05:13:16 AM »

So you don't know the code then, you're just surmising from what you know about this kind of system. I can surmise from what I know, and my conclusions are different to yours.
Answering as if on behalf of Mach4 is misleading, and you should refrain from doing so if you're not intimately involved in the management of the code.

There's no realtime control needed to keep the ESS in step. All you need is for Mach4 to know what it's told the ESS to do, and the ESS needs to tell Mach4 how much of that has been done. They can both agree when the motion has stopped, and the ESS can tell Mach4 where it is. That's VERY simple to do, and Mach4 only has to make note of that for when it restarts.

Note, there's no expectation that Mach4 will be able to restart from this as if it were paused. The only expectation is that Mach4 won't have lost knowledge of where the machine is. That really isn't much to ask, and as I've explained, it isn't difficult.

Don't tell me nothing has changed, because it has. The whole way that Mach4 behaves now is sluggish compared to the version I switched from. Clearly there's now more buffering involved because it's not snappy any more.

E-Stop is not the same as Stop, because E-Stop invokes the disabling of the drives which most certainly will cause loss of position.

Let's leave it for Mach personnel to answer for themselves, rather than you guessing what they can or can't do.

5

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Pressing Stop button during move loses position

« on: May 17, 2021, 03:14:52 AM »

Firstly, I've been stopping using the Stop button since 2008 and have never been aware of losing position, so I think you're overstating the case or is just doesn't pan out the way you describe.
Secondly, this is now VERY different, because now you lose a huge amount of steps which is definitely NOT what was happening.

Thirdly, it only stops that in the way you describe because that's the way you've designed it. I'm sure it's easy enough to keep Mach4 in step with the steps output if you were interested in doing that. The ESS could simply give a one off count back to Mach4 to tell it what steps have been output.

Personally, calling it a 'crash stop' is misleading, because it infers a loss of control. The button says Stop, that's all. A rapid stop is fine, you just have to maintain syncronism with the ESS rather than just throwing up your hands. This is all about philosophy and expectation. The user has one expectation, and you have another. I think you should do more to keep the two alighned.

6

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Pressing Stop button during move loses position

« on: May 16, 2021, 05:17:43 AM »

I have an AC Servo with encoder feedback that has no difficulty in following any stream of steps that the controller outputs. I've never had any issue with pressing the stop button because my system just follows the output.
Something new has been introduced whereby the controller doesn't output the right amount of steps during this procedure. That's a bug that's been introduced that wasn't there before.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with a controlled rapid stop, it's exactly what you want when you see something going wrong and you want it to stop without losing position. If the position control system can't cope with that, it's a problem for the control system. It's up to Mach4 to always output the true amount of steps so control can be resumed. To just dump a buffer full of outputs is just plain wrong.

I can't see how the ESS would lose counts. If Mach4 outputs a position move, the ESS surely just outputs whatever it's been told. Why would you lose anything?

Why has this been changed? it makes no sense to keep changing things that worked perfectly well before!

7

Mach4 General Discussion / Pressing Stop button during move loses position

« on: May 15, 2021, 07:01:27 AM »

This never used to happen. However, since I updated to 4612, it's now a problem.
I think this is connected with the horrible sluggish response that we now get with Mach4 when doing anything that used to be nice and snappy. I get the impression that it's to do with a buffer being filled and emptied.
In this case, the contents of the buffer seems to be getting dumped! I've just clocked up the job again, and it lost 0.61mm in the X-axis!!!

To be honest, I'm sick of the problems that have been introduced... the Single block, the sluggish response and now lost position. It used to be a much more stable platform, and now I can't trust it.

Please don't tell me that I shouldn't hit Stop while it's running. That always worked and it's something you can do on any CNC machine. It's up to the CNC control to deal with it or disallow it, not the user.

I've ordered a KFLOP and KANALOG board from Dynamotion so I can get a machine that I can rely upon to repond correctly to the user commands. It's a pity, because Mach4 has so much promise. However, endless tinkering and messing up basic functions that worked fine for years is not acceptable.

8

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: 4612 Build

« on: April 24, 2021, 05:12:02 AM »

Compared to the old 3804 build I used for years, this build doesn't respond crisply to the user interface any more. There's a noticeable delay when you jog, stop or start. When you jog multiple times it doesn't respond as nicely as it used to do. I don't know what's changed, but I very much preferred it as it was.
I'm seriously considering moving away from Mach4, I really don't like the way the fundamental behaviour changes significantly from one build to the next, with bugs being introduced along the way. When something works well, why not just leave well alone?
So far, all I've seen from the new build are backward steps from what I had before.

9

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach4 hogging CPU time

« on: April 08, 2021, 05:31:21 AM »

I've just tried that, and it's still taking 7-10% of the CPU time, but it's a lot less than when the ESS is selected. I tried the test with the ESS powered down too, just to make sure it couldn't be communicated with.

That still seems a lot to me since it's not doing anything.

10

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach4 hogging CPU time

« on: April 07, 2021, 03:16:02 PM »

Well, the PC has the following specification...

AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 640 Processor   3.00 GHz with 8.00 GB of RAM running 64bit Windows 10.

This is like using a dragster engine in a street car. It's using an ESS, so even when it's working, it doesn't have much to do.

Looking at the Task Manager, it's showing Power Usage as High, and the Network is at a constant 0.5Mbps