Messages

321

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Suggested OS

« on: January 27, 2018, 07:54:50 PM »

Yup, guessing here confirmed. Not like I have a Vista PC so can't confirm or deny either way.

That's the good part. I have two fresh, free vista pc's all cleaned up and ready to go. (for what its worth   )

Good for who? Lol

My 39 Chevy is all original ... and still runs fine.
If it ain't broke, why fix it ?  

Good point. But installing Mach4 and using an external motion device on a Vista PC is the equivalent of adding air ride, ABS brakes and electronic fuel injection to that 39. If Vista works good for you, I'd run it to death. But similarly, if your car breaks chances are it's gonna be a bit more troublesome to fix than something that has parts that are readily available and doesn't require a specialist with knowledge of ancient technology. Well, setting a system up with Vista is no different. I think what you need to do is push on through with the Vista/Mach4 setup. When you get done you can be the resident specialist for such cases. You could probably even make some money doing it. Tons of it. I'm talking Elvis Presley rich.  

322

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Suggested OS

« on: January 27, 2018, 05:39:48 PM »

And I'm guessing Art was kind of forced into making the parallel port driver work in Vista with 3 years ago (which was a huge pain form what i understand). Yeah, if you have it, might not hurt to throw it in. But if you don't, surely not worth the effort to.

323

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Suggested OS

« on: January 27, 2018, 05:36:22 PM »

I'm not completely sure on this RC but I think the reason Vista is not listed for use with an external motion device is that no external motion device manufacturer tested their plugin against Vista. I can't say as I blame them either. Vista was\is considered by most (evidently, microsoft too) a big typo in itself. Kind of a bastard child. Coupled with the fact that Microsoft had ended support for it before Mach4 even came out......... yeah, I wouldn't have given it the first thought myself.

324

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Trouble Loading Mach4Lathe

« on: January 26, 2018, 09:55:17 PM »

my expectation is that it would load and run with the Sim(ulator) plugin out of the box

Yes, well ummmmm in a perfect world bugs wouldn't exist either. 

Have you checked the configuration to see if the axis have motors enabled and those motors are mapped to the axis? It won't jog if the axis do not have enabled motors mapped to them.

325

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Trouble Loading Mach4Lathe

« on: January 26, 2018, 07:32:42 PM »

Did you try the ol' "Create your own Profile" trick?
After I did that, it would consistently open OK, but much of it wouldn't work ... like jogging.
My Dell Latitude 400 laptop w/XP was just too "poor".

Have you checked the configuration to see if the axis have motors enabled and those motors are mapped to the axis? It won't jog if the axis do not have enabled motors mapped to them.

326

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Suggested OS

« on: January 25, 2018, 09:50:20 PM »

Running Windows 10 here.

327

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Probing wizard - no coroutine - no wait - no PLC script

« on: January 25, 2018, 09:48:51 PM »

Have a look at the mcTouchOff module in the modules directory.

Open a mill profile and click the touch button. That will launch it.

Maybe better than that is just using Gcode.

328

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Help with Mach 4 controlling a PLC for tool changes.

« on: January 24, 2018, 05:34:40 PM »

Take a look at my macro again.  It uses registers to tell the Click which tool is requested.

Yup, Chads' m6 looks like it does exactly all you will need to do in script. Get the PLC doing its thing and your done!  

329

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Help with Mach 4 controlling a PLC for tool changes.

« on: January 24, 2018, 09:09:45 AM »

I understand what you mean and can program my PLC for the most part

Good, get that done first like I said. Once you have the tool changer working right and it can change tools when you tell it 2 things....

1) What tool to get through a register
2) Change to that tool (start tool change) through a register

you're virtually finished and you can do all of this before you ever even install Mach4.

Then you will need the PLC to tell you that the tool change is complete (by changing that register that told it to change tools).

Once you have that done getting the m6 to do 3 things......

1) Tell the PLC those 2 things (what tool to get and start tool change).
2) Then wait for conformation that the PLC has finished changing tools.
3) Then update your tool offsets or error out depending on what the confirmation check comes back with.

will be super easy with Mach4. I have given you most of it (though not completely accurate) already. But you get the PLC changing tools as I described using only the PLC and Qmodbus (or similar) someone here will help you get the scripting in your m6 (if I have to do it myself). And do note I said help. Help means you will learn too. But if someone else does it all for you it will take all the fun out of it. Don't want that. Hobbies are supposed to be fun.  

How does Mach know what signal to send to my PLC with the identity of the tool that needs changing?

local current, rc = mc.mcToolGetCurret(inst)
local selected, rc = mc.mcToolGetSelected(inst)

But, like I said, you need not even worry about that yet. Use Qmodbus to write to a register in the PLC telling the PLC what tool to change to.

but I'm not understanding the code.

You can fix that. Look up those 2 api calls in the Mach4 core API doc. It's in your C:\Mach4 Hobby\Docs directory.

Trust me, doing this in Mach4 will be much easier than you think if you can get the PLC doing its thing. But I wont be helping much with that. Others here probably will but if not I'm sure you can work through it between Click's docs and AutomationDirects forum, support and other resources.

330

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Help with Mach 4 controlling a PLC for tool changes.

« on: January 24, 2018, 01:48:27 AM »

If you do it like I'm suggesting, you can get rid of just about all of that script. It does require the PLC ladder to handle all of the tool change internally though but how it should be IMO.

function m6()
    local current = mc.mcGetCurret(inst)
    local selected = mc.mcGetSelected(inst)

    if (current ~= selected) then --do a tool change
        Set tool number reg in PLC to selected
        Set go to work bit to 1 --Maybe fire a PLC output to a Mach input instead or map that register to an input so can do a wait for signal
        rc = mc.mcSignalWait(signal, state, time)
        if (rc ~= 0) then --we had some kind of error
            mc.mcCntlSetLastError(inst, "Tool Change Failed" )
            mc.mcCntlCycleStop(inst)
        end
    end
end

That's not exactly right but about all the script you would need.