Guest
Show Posts
1
General Mach Discussion / Multiple questions
« on: September 14, 2009, 10:16:33 AM »
I have multiple questions, hopefully someone can give me some insight. I'm building a 4 axis benchtop mill for home use. This mill will have additional features such as ATC, manual overides for spindle speed and feed rate, etc. My plan is to get the (4) 400 oz. in. 4 wire stepper motors to move on the benchtop before proceeding with any of the other features. Thus far I've been unsuccessful. Let me start by saying that I purchased Mach 3 and installed the license file but the software doesn't seem to recognize that the license file has been installed. Not sure that matters, but I thought I'd throw it out there. The OS on this computer is XP. 512 RAM. One of the initial problems I noticed is that I'm unavle to reset the E-stop on on the blue and silver screen set that I also downloaded, so I moved on to one the generic screens for the moment. The folks that provided me with BOB and drivers (Probotix) were trying to give some help, but admittedly they are Linux users and not completely up to speed on Mach 3. The first thing we tried was to change the setting in the bios for the parallel port (which is married to the MB) to EPP. It was originally set at PS2?
?. Anyway the system didn't like that and almost immedaitley crashed. They indicated that I shoud get an add-on parallel card, which I did. Installed that, and I'm still in the same boat. Not sure if I'm fighting a hardware problem, or a software problem Windows or Mach. This parallel card also comes with a 9 pin COM port piggybacked onto it (actually there are 2 if you chosse to install it ) but only port (LPT1) shows up on the hardware tab when yoy look at it. Can I assume they share the same port and cannot be used at the same time? Not sure what the next move should be. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
?. Anyway the system didn't like that and almost immedaitley crashed. They indicated that I shoud get an add-on parallel card, which I did. Installed that, and I'm still in the same boat. Not sure if I'm fighting a hardware problem, or a software problem Windows or Mach. This parallel card also comes with a 9 pin COM port piggybacked onto it (actually there are 2 if you chosse to install it ) but only port (LPT1) shows up on the hardware tab when yoy look at it. Can I assume they share the same port and cannot be used at the same time? Not sure what the next move should be. Any help would be greatly appreciated.