Messages

1

General Mach Discussion / Re: Jerky Motion & Poor Quality in Curves

« on: July 18, 2006, 06:14:23 AM »

ya, i read that already, but i figured this was a more appropriate place to get good Mach Answers. As far as i can tell, you enable constant velicity ono the STATE page from the CONFIG menu. Once enabled, that page you showed (from the SETTINGS Tab) allows you to restrict how sharp an angle before the CV is suppressed. What the numbers actually mean are a mysetry to me. 180 degrees does not make sense, and the number below it???

2

General Mach Discussion / Re: Lap Top

« on: July 18, 2006, 06:09:45 AM »

Glen,

The desktop is a Dimension 2400, but basically, YES, that was last years model of what is the 110. It is their bare-bones "teaser" model, but it is more than sufficient for the milling task. You just have to be strong with the two-dollar-itus at the Dell site. Otherwise, your $299 Dell ends up costing $1,500 once you start upgrading.

Also, i did spend all the time reading Art's optimisation document. it DOES get the driver graph settled down, but my laptop still limited the mill's functionallity.


Ben

3

General Mach Discussion / Re: Lap Top

« on: July 17, 2006, 09:09:04 PM »

The cheap PCMCIA cards give unpredictable results. Not all are guaranteed to be true paralell port replacements.

I "had" been using a Quatech SPP-100. i does work, but i seemed to be stuck at 15 ipm or less. i would get motor stalls over that.

now i have a cheap bargain-basement Dell desktop. Less than 300 bucks (monitor and alll) and now i can move almost 100 ipm.

4

General Mach Discussion / Re: Curious stalling problem

« on: July 17, 2006, 08:59:27 PM »

For what its worth, i DO think its your laptop.....

i have a homemade mill and was running it with my Dell P4 1.7 2GIG RAM. it worked fine up to 15 ipm, but anything over that and i would get occasional stalls. over and the stall were regular.

i "borrowed" my sond desktop on a whim and i can move all three axies at 80 - 100 ipm.

if you can get your hands on a desktop, Mach3 is a quick install and worth the test.

5

General Mach Discussion / Re: Jerky Motion & Poor Quality in Curves

« on: July 17, 2006, 08:51:13 PM »

i have an answer and a question.....


MJR: there is a new post processor in VCarve Pro that outputs true arcs instead of lots of little linear moves. i spoke with Brian and he allowed me to download a beta. it seems to help me. i am having other issues on my mill so i cant tell you for sure if it will be a total cure for you.

Mach experts: it seems that you can select constant velocity for the "soft" curves and set a limit to CV for "hard" corners. the Setting tab looks like it allows this, but the actual values are not clear to me and the mach document help was not much help. can anybody clear up what each of those settings do? the default angle is 180 which seems odd, and there seems to be a multiplier of some sort, defaulted to 1. any help would be great.

Ben

6

LazyCam (Beta) / Tool Offsets

« on: July 01, 2006, 04:34:28 PM »

Most likely I am just confused, but i thought LC was able to offset the cutting path by half the tool diameter. (inside or outside) I can not seem to get this to work. the only tool setting i see related to the path chain is a tool number option. I don't see a diameter setting anywhere. i assumed this tool number was a reference to the M3 tool database. Changing the tool NUMBER does not seem to do anything. I think i have configured the correct tool size in M3 but to no avail.

Any guidance??

FastCote

7

General Mach Discussion / Re: System gets "Jerky" after it has been running for a while

« on: April 02, 2006, 07:31:04 PM »

Yes, no processes spiked and plenty of memory. This laptop has two Gigs of RAM. Is there only one worker process that loads with Mach3? I found the Mach3.exe in Task Manager, but was curious what other processes it might spawn. I wonder if there is a bug in the code that renders the work area view. Is it DirectX that you use Art? Is it possible there is a bug or leak in the 3D renderer?

8

General Mach Discussion / Re: System gets "Jerky" after it has been running for a while

« on: April 02, 2006, 02:57:58 PM »

I have noticed the exact same behavior. After an undetermined amount of time open, Mach3 becomes sluggish and jerky.

It seems as though it is a video problem as the special windows “effects” like the icons in the taskbar program icons sliding when apps close and the start menu item fade-ins and outs are very slow.

I have enabled most all of the advised settings in the optimization document to no avail.

The behavior affects all my other apps as well and does not clear up when restarting Mach3. It takes a reboot to clean it up.

I would be interested in any other processes or services that I could look for to clear the behavior up without rebooting. While this is troublesome behavior, it would be more tolerable if I could just kill a process or restart a service rather than rebooting.