Topics

1

General Mach Discussion / Upgraded Mach3 and now CV won't work at all

« on: June 13, 2012, 10:20:39 PM »

I just had my old control computer from 2006 finally die. It was running a version of Mach 3 probably from about 3 years ago but unfortunately I'm not sure exactly which version.  That version was working fine on the old computer which was running Windows 2000. The computer I just moved to has Windows XP installed on it. I blew away everything unnecessary, stopped all services I could, etc.  Running the very old 2006 version of Mach 3 results in good smooth 3d carving when CV mode is turned on but it's losing steps like crazy. The Mach driver check looked great so I figured I should really upgrade to the current build of Mach 3.

Sure enough, the lost steps went away and it runs very well, until I turned CV on and tried a 3d relief carving. It runs exactly as if in exact stop mode. CV is showing as being on but no matter what settings I use it behaves as if it is off. Nothing I do will make CV behave. It's really strange that I'm using my old settings files which worked fine before. Is there something else that needs to be done like recreating all my settings in the current version? Did something change in the settings files over the last 3-6 years to make them incompatible in some way?

Thanks for any light anyone can shed on this.

2

General Mach Discussion / Rotary and Linear Accel Trouble

« on: November 25, 2006, 01:20:55 PM »

I'm having a problem which has been discussed here before but I don't think it was every resolved or completely explained. I just added a 4th axis rotary indexer to my router.  When I cut X,Y,Z alone or A alone everything is fine, but when I cut X, Y or Z at the same time as A the acceleration drops to a SUPER low rate. It ends up taking 6 seconds to accelerate to full speed on the A axis.  I am setting my diameter correctly on the settings page and I have verified that everything does eventually reach the correct feed rates, it's just the acceleration that get screwy.  Here are my settings...

Motor Tuning:
X + Y:
Steps: 1833.864039
Velocity: 600
Acceleration: 15


Z:
Steps: 4710.03
Velocity: 60
Acceleration: 15


A (rotary):
Steps: 40
Velocity: 16200
Acceleration: 3000


Misc:
A Axis is set to Angular
A Diameter is set to 1.5" (testing with a 1.5" dowel)


From what I read on the couple of posts that came up searching for angular acceleration, it looks like Mach uses the accel setting that is the lowest for all axes involved which makes sense. However, it is accelerating at a small fraction of the lowest acceleration axis so something seems very wrong.  If I can't fix it, jobs that used to take 10 minutes on my old proprietary controller will now take hours to cut with Mach which can't be right since every other type of operation is way faster than my old box. I'm assuming I'm missing something here.

Any ideas on how to resolve this?