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Mach4 General Discussion / Jogging Really Rough With New MPG Pendant

« on: November 02, 2020, 10:09:28 PM »

Hi all,
Been working on installing a MPG pendant on my mill. It's the generic type, 4 axis switch, 3 speed switch, enable button, E-stop and of course the MPG. And about 20 wires to find a home for.
Managed to get it all wired up and working after a few days of research and some hair pulling, however there are two one bumps that have propped up that have me and google stumped.

1. On Mach4 screen set, I have jogging buttons that work as per usual but when I press the "Button Jog Mode" the boxes ether side ( "0.0010" and "Continuous" ) don't change appearances, ie the "0.0010" doesn't change from gray to white and the "Continuous" doesn't change to "Incremental". The function works fine though, there's just no indication if it's in Continuous or Incremental mode.
    I should note that the machine jogs smoothly when using these buttons. I added a sketch to the screen set to run the pendant but didn't alter anything outside of that.

2. When jogging with the pendant MPG it makes the whole machine rattle. When set to move X1, it's not to bad. X10 gets louder and X100 is kind of scary. At first I thought it was the acceleration and velocity I forgot to set on the MPG tab under Configure so I set them to the same setting as is under the Motors tab. 7000 velocity and 1200 acceleration but this made no difference?
    Scratch this, just got it figured out. MPG Velocity and Acceleration are %'s not actual. Set them both to 100 and
    rough jogging is cured.

Would be nice to figure out screen jogging button issue though, any suggestions??

Cheers,
J

2

Mach4 General Discussion / Spindle Index Setup With Hall Sensor??

« on: March 27, 2020, 06:01:39 PM »

Hi All,
I've been working on getting spindle control working through Mach4 for the last couple weeks and I think I have everything hardware wise in place or on order.

I'm running Mach4 and using an ESS connected to a C25 BoB.
These are controlling Clearpath Servos for X, Y, Z movements.
The spindle is belt drive at a 2.2:1 ratio. 1 rotation of motor = 2.2 rotations of spindle.
Motor is a 1.5Kw 3 phase induction motor wired for delta and is run by a Teco VFD.
I have a C41S-PWM Variable Speed Control Board on order to connect the VFD to the ESS.

Now to my problem... I'm not getting and feed back on Mach4.
I have a hall sensor pulsing off 4 magnets mounted equally around the spindle shaft.
This is connected to Port 2 Pin 3 input, +5v and ground.
When tested with multi meter, a LOW on the C25 BoB reads 2.5v and HIGH read 4.8v. And the indicator LED on pin 3 glows accordingly (not so bright to bright) as a magnet passes the hall sensor.

I'm not sure if it should behave like this and if this is the cause of the problem. I would have thought LOW should measure 0v and HIGH (as a magnet passes over) should measure around 5v.

I've gone through various setting in Mach, including pin setup and activating Spindle Encoder Phase A, trying Spindle Index option and more. I'm still not getting any response from Mach to acknowledge the presents of a spindle index or encoder.

 I've been toiling with this for a couple weeks now and am open to any and all suggestions/ideas. I don't know if I've got Mach4 set up right or if the Hall sensor is faulty?

 Initially the hall sensor was setup on an Arduino and reading the RPM of a small lego motor and it worked perfectly, but once it was setup on the mill spindle via the Arduino and display the readout went crazy.

Hall sensor Data sheet.
https://www.jaycar.co.nz/medias/sys_master/images/images/9369043927070/ZD1902-dataSheetMain.pdf

Basically all I want is a real time actual RPM count of the spindle.
If I issue an M3 S1000 command how does Mach know the spindle is geared 2.2:1?

3

Mach4 General Discussion / G-Code Just Cutting Circles

« on: January 18, 2019, 03:11:53 AM »

Hey all.
I'm in the process of converting my mill to CNC. I've got clearpath servos x, y, z run by ESS controller using Mach4. Today was the first test using a gcode file produced by Fusion 360. Basically it was meant to do about 6 passes  to make a square block round and drill 6 holes. It kind of made it round but it used circle cuts on the outside to achieve this. And the hole drilling would have shared the drill on the first hole.

Has anyone seen this before? Any suggestions as to where I when wrong?


Cheers,
J