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Mach4 General Discussion / Need help with some strange behavior.

« on: July 13, 2021, 03:16:30 AM »

I have an Industrial Hobbies 12z mill I converted to CNC that until today has worked flawlessly.

In the attached picture you can see it roughed the bore in the middle no problem using a 1/2 inch endmill. After the bore I changed tools to a smaller 1/4 endmill. I don't know if it is related or not but while probing my z hight I noticed the z axis was behaving strangely. I turned the velocity down for the z axis stepper and it started working fine again so I continued on.

As you can see the ring around the outside started off just fine and quickly turned into well I don't know. I didn't catch it immediately because the flood coolant made the issue hard to see.

Once I noticed what was going on I tried stopping the feed just to find out both my vistaCNC pendant and my touchscreen monitor where both unresponsive so I had to use the e-stop to turn it off. Mach 4 did still function normally if I used a mouse and keyboard but the pendant and touchscreen both quit working.

I'm a little lost as to what is going on here I don't know if the frozen touchscreen and pendant even have anything to do with it.

This machine runs steppers and I have never had issues with missed steps before however if this is missed steps I'm a little confused as to how it was still making a perfect circle all the way around the bore rather than just wondering off.

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Mach4 General Discussion / Mach4 2 Point Outside Centering Problem.

« on: November 22, 2020, 12:57:29 AM »

I am having some issues with probing in mach4. I seem to be able to get everything to work fine but for the life of me I can't get the 2 point outside centering to work.

The help button for this operation seems to say the probe needs to start roughly centered over the top of the part. When I press measure center y the probe moves in the y+ direction briefly then stops giving me an error that it has reached the limit of the move.
If I try starting the probe beside the part it gives me a probe interference error when the probe touches the part.

I can't seem to understand how this is suppose to work. When I adjust the approach and width options it changes the amount the axis moves but no matter what I do I get no z axis movement at all.

I have tried nearly all of the other probing options and all the rest seem to work exactly like expected even the inside centering found under the same tab.

This may or may not be related but when I probe using the probing tab the probe will touch the part then retouch at a slower speed. If I use the probing wizard it doesn't do the second slow speed touch it only touches once.