Messages

1

General Mach Discussion / Re: Mach 3 won't talk to my PC,

« on: July 21, 2014, 08:35:25 PM »

Hood,

This is embarrassing but I'm not even sure where to pull the XML file your referencing. From reading a few posts I can see its a file of my configurations in mach, but as to creating it I'm still learning. The good news is that after uninstalling and reinstalling mach I have movement! Matter of fact everything is running great! Now I'm dealing with how to tune the steppers. They hiss a bit with fast decay and full or 1/2 step settings but at 1/8 microstep and slow current decay not too bad. I just can't figure out how to make them start up more smoothly, they jerk from 0%-50% speed then smooth out at full speed. Is this normal?

Also, at full speed they have very small jitters maybe 3-5 blips per 2-3 seconds. Not sure if this means lost steps yet as I'm still watching the tape spin on the motor shafts. But after spending 8+ hours debugging I'm happy happy happy to see motion.

Can you give me a hint as to where I can copy this XML? Thanks for your patience!

2

General Mach Discussion / Mach 3 won't talk to my PC,

« on: July 20, 2014, 04:52:32 PM »

First off, I'm very new to CNC and though I've read up on a lot of the aspects of cnc I still have a lot of applicational skills to learn.

With that said, I'm stuck still trying to get my parallel port cable to show signs of signal transmission. I set everything up according to the manual that came with the red tb6560 board that I bought from sainsmart and no movement was seen. So I killed the power and hooked up my multimeter to measure my voltage drop across the pins of the parallel port cable. I measured these pins with mach3 open and estop reset button not blinking. Here is what I read, (pin# - voltage)

1-3.3v 2-0v 3-0v 4-3.3v 5-0v 6-0v 7-0v 8-0v 9-0v 10-4v 11-4v 12-4v 13-4v 14-3.3v 15-4v 16-3.3v 17-0v 18-0v 19-0v 20-0v 21-0v 22-0v 23-0v 24-0v 25-ground

Seems to me the pin 3 should have went from 0-3.3V as I moved the x axis, but nothing. So I looked into my device manager for the port name, and the only LTP was 378 and mach had that selected already. The other port was COM1. I thought it was my board, since I've heard a lot of bad things about these drivers, but I can't even make smoke, vibrations in the motors, nothing!

The PC I'm using is a dell GX 620 with win 7 32bit os. Please help me from going crazy by measuring voltages of my parallel port pins repeatedly lol!