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Topics - Stuart_H

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1
General Mach Discussion / A couple of design formulas wanted
« on: August 15, 2013, 06:36:08 AM »
Good evening guys,
Some time ago I was given a formula to work out what holding torque requirements i needed of a stepper motor to run the rack and pinion drive system of my router. It considered the weight of the axis to be moved and the speed of travel. Unfortunately I have misplaced it. Also another formula to work out the power supply voltage to a Stepper to get the best performance.

If somebody has this info, I would very much appreciate it.

Stuart

2
General Mach Discussion / Help with electrical interference
« on: May 19, 2012, 11:58:07 PM »
Good evening all,
I have just completed building a 1300mm X 900mm router table with rack and pinion gantry drive design. I am very happy with the operation of the table and have had great success with the accuracy of it but I am now faced with this frustrating problem.

Subsequent to the initial design I have connected 5 limit/ home switches all wired in series and connected to pin 10 on the breakout board. Also a dedicated Emergency stop switch to pin 12 on the breakout board. Both work exactly as expected, however as soon as I start the spindle motor, it triggers a limit switch activation and the machine stops. If I reset it, the machine will run for about another 10 seconds or so before doing the same. On the diagnostic page, all five limit switch LED's illuminate for about half a second each time the interference occurs. The spindle is a Chinese HY brand 1.5 kw unit and it appears to operate without any issues very smoothly. The spindle is totally electrically isolated from the breakout board. I.e. control is only achieved through the operation of the touch panel on the front of the VFD.

This is what I have tried so far to overcome the problem:

All wiring to the stepper motors, limit switches and spindle motor has been replaced with shielded wire and all shielding taken to a common ground.
The spindle carrier frequency has been changed throughout its entire range with no change.
The config debounce has been set to a figure of up to 2000 ms with no change.

Short of pulling what little hair I have left out, I am stumped with how to fix this.

Any help appreciated

Stuart

3
General Mach Discussion / Steppers are too slow
« on: November 30, 2011, 04:51:07 AM »
Thanks to all for this great site.

I am currently setting up to build a 1200mm X 900mm router table and have been trying to get some sense out of Mach 3 running 4 stepper motors ("a" axis slaved to "y" axis).

The problem I am having is with the stepper motor speed. I am lucky if they are turning at about 50 RPM. The following describes the setup:

  • The steppers are 380 oz/in being driven by Wantai DQ542MA drivers.
  • The power supply is 24 volts which was supplied with the drivers. I have also tried another power supply with no change.
  • Breakout board is powered by independant 5V supply and have tried 2 other combinations of supply including 2 separate 5V supplies with the jumpers removed from the BOB
  • Have been into the motor tune settings and tried a number of different configurations and calibration settings
  • Tried replacing the parallel cable in case there was a pin out there. No change.
  • I have another combination stepper driver/ breakout board with 3- 180oz/in steppers and they seem to run without any problems at a pretty normal speed
  • Mach 3 driver test is excellent with a very stable trace line at a freq. of 25003 khz.
  • The motors all seem to run smoothly but just too slow. Also it does not make any difference whatsoever where the microstep switches are set. It is like it is running in max microstep all the time.
  • Is it possibly a faulty breakout board or is there a hidden tick box in mach 3 which I haven't found causing my grief.

I find it hard to believe that all 4 drivers are faulty to this extent, but I have pulled what little hair I have out to try and solve this problem.

Any past experiences or knowledge would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Stuart

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4
General Mach Discussion / Screen Resolution
« on: October 17, 2011, 04:31:31 AM »
Good evening all,
Firstly, I doubt there will be anybody out there at the moment as new to this game as me.

I am in the process of putting together a router table as my first project in CNC. The computer I am using tests fine with the Mach 3 program which came with the Stepper driver board (from China) but still to be registered. I am unable to get the screen size to take up the full screen unless I set the resolution to 1024 X 768. Currently it is set to 1280 X 1024 which works fine with other programs on the machine. Have tried selecting the auto screen size option but this didn't help.

Do I have any other option, other than to set the resolution to 1024 X 768 to get a full screen? Is there a later version or file to download which addresses this issue?

Appreciate any advise.

Stuart

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