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« on: November 24, 2012, 03:06:11 PM »
Good afternoon all,
I've been lurking on this forum the last few weeks while I've been building my machine, and have learned a lot. So far I've been able to solve all my problems by reading thru the posts on the forum. My machine's working fine, I've routed out a bunch of test pieces and gotten the bugs worked out. My last problem I need a little help with. As stated in the heading, I'm using a USB Smooth Stepper with the plugin C25 card from CNC4PC. The problem I'm having is I have no voltage on the input pins of the C25 card. I have plugged the jumpers on the Smooth Stepper to supply +5 volts to the C25, and have that voltage on the +5 volt pins. I have ground on the Gnd pins. As a consequence I have to use 5 volts out to the limit switches and back to the input pins. This works fine, except for my auto tool zero touch plate. If I don't isolate the router from all sources of machine/electrical ground, I crash my computers USB port when the touch plate connects with the tool bit. I borrowed the power supply from an old desktop computer I had laying around and used it to supply external power to the Smooth Stepper, and that at least stopped the crashing. I still occasionally get a bit of noise induced upon the tool touch that brings in false limit warnings, but that's not much of a problem. The C25 documentation shows that I should be able to use ground to an input pin, but as I said, I can't. No amount of Mach3 re-configuration changes that. If I unplug the C25 board and go straight to the Smooth Stepper printer port pins, everything works as it should, but or course I loose the isolation that the C25 board supplies.
So my question, is anyone else using this configuration, and can they use ground to trigger their input pins? I have filed a trouble ticket with CNC4PC, but have heard nothing back from them so far.
Thanks, Steve.
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Good evening all. I'm having a problem with the Motor Tuning screen that has me a bit baffled. My system has been up and running for a while now, and is still working fine with Mach 3. My problem is that I've decided to tweek the motor tuning a bit, and the motor tuning screen won't come up. I can click on the menu item, and I can see the Mach3.exe process in the window task manager bump up in it's cpu usage, but the motor tuning screen doesn't start up. Anyone ever have this happen, and what might be the problem? I suppose I will end up uninstalling and reinstalling the program, but before I do, I thought I'd ask on here.