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General Mach Discussion / Setting Steps Per Unit in Mach3
« on: July 18, 2011, 03:37:07 PM »
Hi Guys,
After a few mods I have finally got my Denford Novamill up to the stage of configuring mach3. I have added new stepper motors, Nema 23 double stack motors on the X and Y axis and a Nema 34 single stack motor on the Z axis. The control I am using is from Rhonmac cnc with the controllers set to 8 microsteps.
The machine has a belt drive on each axis giving a reduction ratio of 1:2.5, the pitch on the ballscrew is 5mm. From this I worked out the steps per unit should be 800 (for a metric setup) I set this for each axis and when I commanded a movement of 1mm I got a very small movement on the machine. To get the machine moving the same amount as that commanded I had to set the steps per unit to 25889.97. I`m confused as to why my calculated number of 800 is so different to the actual one required?
Also, with such a high steps per unit the max speed is reduced to 57.94 which is about right from a crude measurement I did with stopwatch.
One thing to note is I`m only using the demo version of mach3 as I wanted to see if it was all going to work before I bought the license. Would this make a difference?
Any help would be much appreciated, thanks in advance!
Mike
After a few mods I have finally got my Denford Novamill up to the stage of configuring mach3. I have added new stepper motors, Nema 23 double stack motors on the X and Y axis and a Nema 34 single stack motor on the Z axis. The control I am using is from Rhonmac cnc with the controllers set to 8 microsteps.
The machine has a belt drive on each axis giving a reduction ratio of 1:2.5, the pitch on the ballscrew is 5mm. From this I worked out the steps per unit should be 800 (for a metric setup) I set this for each axis and when I commanded a movement of 1mm I got a very small movement on the machine. To get the machine moving the same amount as that commanded I had to set the steps per unit to 25889.97. I`m confused as to why my calculated number of 800 is so different to the actual one required?
Also, with such a high steps per unit the max speed is reduced to 57.94 which is about right from a crude measurement I did with stopwatch.
One thing to note is I`m only using the demo version of mach3 as I wanted to see if it was all going to work before I bought the license. Would this make a difference?
Any help would be much appreciated, thanks in advance!
Mike