Topics

1

General Mach Discussion / Mach 3 issues, just upgraded from mach2.

« on: October 01, 2008, 10:32:32 AM »

Hey guys, Its been a while since I've been here, Its also been a while since I've used my CNC.

I tossed the old laptop that ran my mill because it did a crappy job and got a P4 2.8ghz machine to run it. I decided it was time to run Mach3.

Other than the screen(which I really don't like), theres been a few things that have changed and I have been unable to find the fix for.
First: Jog override, I ran this to set my jog at 10% unless I press shift and jog, this helps with a ton of things, using the jog to cut something quick, setup, etc. I cannot find this anywhere.
Second: Homing. The homing sequence homes onto the switch then backs off and sets zero. This causes problems because of maybe sticky switches or whatnot, they will always click at the same time going in but not always release at the same rate, I have sealed switches that are a little slow to release. I'd like this to home into and as soon as it goes, its done. For some reason i could get x axis to do this but none of the rest. All of the switches are normally open, all on different input channels.
I think there is a third question but I don't recall what it is at this time, I'll post it later.

Please let me know if there is a fix for these.
Thanks!
Jon

2

General Mach Discussion / Rutex SPI

« on: March 17, 2006, 12:59:21 AM »

Art and others, I have been very fasinated with Rutex SPI interface they have on their new breakout boards for their drives, I can quote a few things out of one of their pdf's:
http://www.rutex.com/pdf/R20x0.pdf

"The SPI motion command is simply a
16-bit number of steps per each particular servo loop cycle (or quite often called as velocity word). Rather
then clocking each step individually, the host CNC tells the drive the number of step via SPI. For example,
with a 1ms loop-time, the maximum speed of SPI motion is +/-32767 steps/ms or 32,767,000 steps per
second."

"The SPI can be easily implemented in PC
using standard printer port (LPT) similar way as it is use for step&dir generation."

"The SPI is using 3
communication lines: clock, data-out and data-in. Clock and Data-out are same as Step and Dir signals."


Theres much more in that manual, such as controlling 7 axes with only 9 signal lines.

This is a communication interface that would be very useful for many rutex users, its one of the main things thats stopping me from buying their drives for my brushless servos, mainly because step/dir over the parallel port will be way slow for the high res encoders.


It sounds like Rutex is making a DLL or something like that for this interface, I along with many others are very intersted in seeing a package such as Mach software, even Mach 3 incorporated with SPI.



Thanks,
Jon

3

LazyCam (Beta) / Lazycam acting crazy

« on: March 17, 2006, 12:23:57 AM »

Hey, I loaded up a dxf the other day, the ends were not closed(doubt that has anything to do with anything) so basicly I set all the depths and press make g-code. my system started grinding real good, so i go to the folder and see a 13mb file! Mass confusion. so, oh well, I'll load it into notepad, next thing I know I have 7mb out of 1gb free memory, my page file grew from 300mb to 1.8gb and my dual core 3800+ was running at full bore. so I try to end task both notepad and lazycam, while looking in the task manager lazycam was still doing stuff, taking up the processing power of one cpu(guessing notpad was taking the other) and it wouldnt end, after a few minutes of messing with it I finally got them to end. So I reboot, load up mach3 and try to load the file, that hangs and wont end either. I reboot once again and go exploor for the file and see its 600MB!!!

Im pretty sure this all really doesnt mean anything, I dont have any real information from what happened. Its just a crazy expreience I had with it.

Hope I dont scare anyone away


Jon