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1

General Mach Discussion / Getting Outputs from Mach3

« on: January 30, 2013, 09:00:57 AM »

Hi
    I have a 5 axis breakout board but only use 3 axes, so I have some spare outputs ,
A step , A direction , A enable , B step, B direction and B enable

On my pendant I wish to have 3 LEDs to indicate the jog increment step 1mm , 0.1mm , 0.01mm
my plan was to use these spare outputs on the B.O.B  to drive the LEDs .

Can someone tell me if its possible and if so how I can get Mach3 to output 3 signals when the
1mm , 0.1 or 0.01 jog increment is enabled

I am ok at making inputs work  and I can see that an easy way around my problem might be to
design 3 buttons on screen and assign each one a hotkey and an OEM code in the range
191 -200 which I think are the jog steps in the list of ten on the config/general config page.
My Pendant has a keyboard encoder in it  so I could use  3 buttons to give me the hotkeys which
then trigger the OEM codes   

But I would sooner use ALT J to cycle through the jog increments and have LEDs indicate which is selected

Can it be done?

Don

2

General Mach Discussion / Strange Jogging results

« on: January 25, 2013, 05:52:17 AM »

When I first installed Mach3 I could set the jog increment to
1.0000 ,0.1000 ,0.0100 or 0.0010 and set it for single step then
pressing the jog button it would jog as I would expect it to

setting it to 0.0001 didnt work so obvious. For about every 8 presses
on the jog button it would increase by 0.0005 but I doubt I would want to
jog in steps that small anyway

So far so good .

My lead screws are 3mm pitch and my motor drivers are set to 16 microsteps
and the motor is 200 steps /rev so I calculate that as needing 1066.666667 steps per mm

When I went to motor tuning I changed the original
Steps 2000 , velocity 120  acceleration 4     to my calculated
Steps 1066.7 velocity 120 acceleration 4

The motor moved as expected . Doing G0 X3
made the motor rotate one full turn which with a 3mm pitch screw  gives me 3mm.

Now I went to jog ,

setting step size to 1.0000 and pressing jog it read  0.993 , then 1.9996 , 2.9999 ,4.0002
setting step size to  0.1000 and pressing jog it read 0.0994 ,0.1997, 0.3000
as the step size reduces the problem gets worse

How can I set it to suit my motors required step rate but still work correctly in jog mode ?

Also in Config/General config is a table that will select step size each time you press Alt J
it has 10 lines , but as I dont want to jog in 0.0001 steps I really only need 8 lines.
Is there a way to achieve this without just duplicating a line to fill up the space

Regards
Don