Hello everyone,
I just installed a second par port card and fought to get it to work in Mach3. Once I got the address in correctly It works great in Mach3 with one exception. I'll get to that in a minute. For those of you having odd PCI address issues I had the same. The address in device manager was C000-C007. Where most of the time you would see things like 0378 and 0278 thus Hexed to 0x378 and 0x278 one might think that hex address of C000-C007 was 0x000. This does not work as it is abridged to 0x0 which is not a valid address. I'm including this because I found many people with the same issue on the forum with not seeing the fix. If you have this same issue, your address is 0xC00. If you need the full address of your lpt ports you can do this and it will give you the proper Hex to enter into Mach3.
Go to start> All programs> Accessories> System Tools> System Information> Components> Ports> Parallel
Ok now you know what I know, here's what I do not. As I said the card works GREAT, finally, with one small problem. The card shows 5v on all pins as it should due to internal pullup on the card itself. When I test the card not hooked up to the machine you can see all my limits LEDS in MAch come on and go off as I ground the pins. I have everything in active low. My machine was set up to run NC (normally closed) switches and have 5volts on the system and it would go low when the switch was triggered. This worked fine with port one (Port one is run through a CNC4PC C10) however after dealing with bad opto chips and massive frustration with the C10 I am runing the second port on a bob I built myself. Let me take a moment here to say that Art at CNC4PC is taking care of the issue with my C10, he is a great guy please support his work. I'm also getting a second C10 to run in this control box. So with port 2, if I hook the port up to my machine running active low and trip a switch nothing happens. Simply opening the 5 volt circuit is not working as a low signal for the car. It never sees it as it's still applying 5volts to the pin. Ok, so I switched the system to run ground through the switches and go active high. I want currant on the NC switches at all times for an active system, rather then just closing the circuit with a fault happens. When I do this, the lights go out on Mach3, but none of the switches work. As I am grounding pins 2-7 you would think that when I open the switch the card would pull up the pin to 5vdc and see a active high signal. It does not.
In fact when I do this and then test the cad, I get nothing, the pins are dead, luckily a restart of the PC resets the pins to high.
Ok, I'm done, your turn. Thoughts?
Evan
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I have been working on my machine for years and am close to added encoders. (up till now to do just what I said). I will still add the encoders but wondered when if at all this might become an feature of our beloved program?