Messages

6371

General Mach Discussion / Re: Power Supply for Motion Controlling

« on: September 24, 2010, 05:11:29 AM »

Hi PJ,

I think we are going round in circles here.

The Astrosyn 402 spec says that it's inputs are TTL compatible (in my book, that's the 5V standard) it does not specifically state that it complies with the 3.3 Volt standard. As I said earlier 3.3 Volt may not be enough to operate some opto-isolators, at least not reliably and I think you should check this point with Astrosyn before proceeding further and looking for problems that may not exist.

You could try using a PC with 5 Volt parallel port or fit a PCI parallel port card with 5 Volt output, either of these two options may solve the problem.

Tweakie.

nb. You are correct - the pulse is associated with step within Mach.

6372

General Mach Discussion / Re: Power Supply for Motion Controlling

« on: September 24, 2010, 02:11:07 AM »

If pin 5 is a problem you could try using another pin number and allocation to see if you have the same problem.

What model breakout board / stepper driver are you using ?.

Tweakie.

6373

*****VIDEOS***** / Re: Vinyl cutting.

« on: September 24, 2010, 02:03:41 AM »

Arbo,

Any vector code works just fine.
When I built my cutter the Roland blades were very expensive but now the Chinese equivalent blade and holder is so cheap it is just a matter of building a spring loaded mount. 

Tweakie.

6374

General Mach Discussion / Re: Acu-rite Glass Scale Position-Trac Coding

« on: September 23, 2010, 12:00:28 PM »

Right - I see what you are trying to achieve now.

As far as I am aware Mach does not operate in closed loop mode.
With servo systems the feedback loop is closed within the servo driver and errors corrected at that point rather than within Mach itself.

This does not mean to say that Mach cannot be operated in closed loop mode but you might just have to be the first person to do it 

Good luck,

Tweakie.

6375

General Mach Discussion / Re: Power Supply for Motion Controlling

« on: September 23, 2010, 10:38:23 AM »

PJ,

The direction signals that you measured with the voltmeter, are they rising to a high level of 5 Volts ?. (some pp outputs only swing to 3.3Volts which may not be enough for some opto isolators in the drivers).
Changing the configuration active high / active low for the step pulse may help.

Tweakie.

6376

General Mach Discussion / Re: Acu-rite Glass Scale Position-Trac Coding

« on: September 23, 2010, 05:24:41 AM »

I really don't think there would be any point in doing this unless you are saying that the accuracy of servo mounted encoders is not good enough.

Tweakie.

6377

VB and the development of wizards / Re: Basic Problems

« on: September 23, 2010, 02:19:25 AM »

Franklin,

You may need to experiment a bit with the pulse width (depending on your stepper motor driver board) but yes that's all you need to do.

Tweakie. 

6378

General Mach Discussion / Re: Power Supply for Motion Controlling

« on: September 22, 2010, 01:18:12 PM »

PJ,

Best to resolve one problem at a time here.

The pin assignments do not normally include pin 1 they are usually (but don't have to be) as follows;

X step - 2
X dir    - 3
Y step - 4
Y dir    - 5
Z step  - 6
Z dir     - 7

At this stage hard wire the enables (they will either be 5V or ground as per the driver instructions) and reconfigure Mach to the pin assignments (if you change anything).
Check that the parallel cable that you are using does actually have pin 1 connected to pin 1, 2 to 2, etc and, if you can, use a voltmeter to measure the PC parallel port outputs to check that, for example, the X dir pin changes state from approx 0V to approx 5V when you hit the X jog arrow keys.

If you report back we will proceed from here.

Tweakie.

6379

Show"N"Tell ( Your Machines) / Re: The Laser Project.

« on: September 22, 2010, 12:40:19 PM »

Hi Guys,

I was issued with bit of a challenge recently to produce the Mayan Calendar to set dimensions on Oak together with their company name at as good a quality as their commercial controller and software can achieve. I think this full-size version is at least equal to their published example (the half-size was done just for a joke).
As with the others, this was produced with the Mach3 Engraving plugin – OK it’s a bit quirky but it gets the job done.

Tweakie.

6380

*****VIDEOS***** / Re: Laser Raster Engraving.

« on: September 21, 2010, 12:57:41 PM »

Hi Andrea,

Looking at the video of the Metaza that seems to be operating at (as near as I can tell) the same speed as my laser (1 second per line). Then how, I wonder, does it manage to fire all the dots per line that quickly ?.

Some alternatives to look at;

Have you tried drastically reducing the feedrate of the Mach plugin and seeing if you can get the pulses far enough apart to operate your magnet (I suspect that the Metaza magnet wire only travels a max of 0.025mm) ?
Can you redesign your magnet (reduce the mass) to make it faster ?

Tweakie.