Messages

1

General Mach Discussion / Re: Servo drift due to EM noise. Optical encoders not preventing it.

« on: December 06, 2017, 09:01:42 PM »

It's a Seig X3 small mill. So China wiring at it's finest. Ive moved the servo controller box to the other side of the room and that seemed to work, but for some reason when it is cold out, the effects are stronger, and I can actually watch the drift happen. In the summer, the drift is so minor, the job does not get effected. I'm only doing engraving.

2

General Mach Discussion / Re: Servo drift due to EM noise. Optical encoders not preventing it.

« on: December 06, 2017, 08:27:40 PM »

I see. I was under the impression it was the opposite. So, if I can't get rid of the EM noise, what would be the next solution? I tried swapping the servo cables and even wrapped them in foil to ground. It worked for a while, but it seems the longer im working the worse it gets. Fresh in the morning, I get no interference, but after about an hour it all goes pear shaped.

3

General Mach Discussion / Servo drift due to EM noise. Optical encoders not preventing it.

« on: December 06, 2017, 07:49:54 PM »

I am a bit confused. On my mill I have servos that have optical encoders. The EM noise from my spindle has always been a problem, and I get servo drift on my Z axis. I thought that optical encoders should be talking to Mach3 to prevent drift. However when I observe the drift, via a micrometer mounted vertically in my vice, I can see the Z axis dropping, but the readout on Mach3 does not show this change. Am I wrong to assume the software should be sensing this through the optical encoders and preventing the drift? Am I missing a setting somewhere?

4

General Mach Discussion / On the fly z axis adjustment?

« on: August 20, 2012, 01:24:08 PM »

I am commonly running into a situation that requires me to stop the operation and go back to zero to make fine depth adjustments to my cutting bit. The problem is created by the fact that the surface I am engraving into is not perfectly flat and I am only engraving down .0025". The surface is extruded aluminum that I wet sand and pre- polish on a buffing wheel to get a mirror finish. then I set my zero at the corner of the stock. Because the buffing wheel does not leave the surface perfectly flat, the cutting bit will sometimes engrave some areas deeper or lighter than the other areas.

So I was wondering if there was a feature in Mach3 that allows me to compensate for lower or higher surfaces on the fly by clicking something on the computer screen instead of having to stop the program and manually lower or raise the cutting bit.

5

General Mach Discussion / Re: Weird, Z axis randomly increasing travel. Causing deeper cuts

« on: January 22, 2011, 12:54:35 PM »

I found the solution to the problem I was having and it turned out to be multiple problems all happening at the same time.
First, I just swapped computers so the mach3 set up was not right and I had the acceleration set to high. This was causing over travel on the down cut.
Second, the mounting bolts on my Z axis servo motor over the years got stressed and came loose. That was my fault for using crappy bolts from home depot.
and last problem was the counter balance of the milling head was not right to begin with, and thats why the acceleration speed needed to be lower in the first place.

When I set all this up 5 years ago I ended up forgetting about all the micky mouse fixes I put into place and they all came back to bite me all at the same time.

6

General Mach Discussion / Weird, Z axis randomly increasing travel. Causing deeper cuts

« on: January 18, 2011, 03:52:51 PM »

So I went to do some .005 " engravings today which I have done everyday for 5 years, and after just a couple commands to lift Z and lower back to .005 it started to cut deeper, then on the next engraving letter deeper still until it was below the flutes on the ball cutter and the cutter snapped.

I took down my Z servo and air blasted the encoder. I ran a Z test bringing from 0 to 1 back to 0, 20 times in a row and it never lost accuracy.

I then did a hard restart on the PC and when I went to fire up Mach3 it gave me an error and instead of showing me an error code it just gave me a blank gray window where moch3 should have been. I clicked close and got a Mach3 has suffered an error message. I restarted mach3 again and it was fine.

I ran my engraving program and everything was fine except a couple engravings in the middle of the program where clearly not as deeply cut as the rest.


Does this sound like a signal interference problem or a software problem?

I'm hesitant to run the program again out of fear of loosing more cutting bits and material stock.

7

General Mach Discussion / Re: servos not traveling proper distance, new install of 2.0

« on: May 10, 2007, 04:54:27 PM »

Right now im on my second cut test, but it seems as if the problem was in the terminal screws on the geckos.

In other words one of the screws was loose.

I don't know for sure if this was the problem, since I simply went in and tightened every screw just to make sure none were loose. Right now the mill is cutting perfectly. Knock wood.
I just wish I knew for sure what the problem was in the first place. I hate when something pretty much fixes it self and I don't know why. It leaves the possibility that the problem is not fixed.
Ill let you know if it continues to function properly.
Rob

8

General Mach Discussion / Re: servos not traveling proper distance, new install of 2.0

« on: May 10, 2007, 12:32:24 PM »

holy cow. I decided to video tape the whole problem and in the middle of taping it got worse!

Normally the servos stop moving when the parallel cable is take out. Now the servos move with out the parallel cable.

It only moves when the mill spindle motor is running at half to full speed. The movement increases in speed the longer the spindle is moving.
I started to play with the trim pots on the gain dampen and limit on the G340's and I have no clue what each of those do, so I let the mill run and only hooked up the wire to the z axis. So the only wires connected to the servo driver box is the z axis, the power cord and the 5 volts coming from the USB port.

So now there is a problem with in the servo box.
I have dc servos, g340 geckos, camtronics servo power supply
Here are photos, I dont know what you want photos off so here is the servo box and the placement of the equipment

9

General Mach Discussion / Re: servos not traveling proper distance, new install of 2.0

« on: May 09, 2007, 07:19:03 PM »

could the parallel port is bad?
I tried switching the bios to all the different parallel port configurations, but none fixed the problem.

10

General Mach Discussion / Re: servos not traveling proper distance, new install of 2.0

« on: May 09, 2007, 05:55:11 PM »

I just ran a experiment to verify the source of the problem
If the spindle is running and the printer cable is plugged in the servos move at approx .001" every 10 seconds
If the spindle is running and the printer cable is un-plugged the servos do not move

This experiment was done with nothing running on the computer. So some how the computer is sending a signal to the printer port even though mach 3 is not on. However I ran this experiment before I installed mach 3 and the servos did not move, so by installing mach3 there was some change done.

When the same experiment is done with mach 3 running, the servos move 3-4 times faster.