Thanks everyone for there positive feedback, its nice to hear and also be able to help.
Chaoticone, I agree about the button to, people just generally want to automate the process and not have a full understanding so therefore it makes it harder to diagnose future issues,
With regards to the acceleration and velocitiy, do you have a guideline that you follow? For example should acceleration be 50% of of the velocity? etc etc or a certain % of the velocity as a guideline. I have generally just played it by ear and gone for something thats not taking off like lightning then jerking to a halt.
Thanks
Chris
Yeah, it can be one of those throwing the baby out with the bathwater kind of things.
I do not usually design the machines so yeah, usually limited to working with what you have to get the best you can out of it. A high acceleration value is often given less credit than it deserves I think. The higher the acceleration the closer you can run to a true path in CV mode. Lots of times it will help more with cycle times than a higher velocity would. All depends on the machine and the job but other things are usually the limiting factor on how fast a machine can actually do the job (tool load for example). But, plasma's have no tool load and most would benefit from higher accelerations but they have to be rigid enough to pull it off. Lasers are the same but I say accel. is even more critical.
If your designing a machine the only way that I know to size the motors is to do the math using spread sheets, some of the online motion calculators, motor sizers etc. With steppers you should have 100% safety factor and the acceleration for machines is the same as cars........... the better the acceleration the better I like it. The beating and banging doesn't bother me if the machine is designed to handle it. Backlash is a no no for sure though.