Messages

1611

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: New people welcome !! Come in here and introduce your self!

« on: September 08, 2008, 11:08:19 PM »

Ray Livingston here, from Santa Cruz, CA, USA.  I'm on my second CNC conversion.  The first was a stepper conversion on a Grizzly mini-mill.  The current one is a servo conversion on a full-sized knee mill, using Gecko G320s and Mach3.  Today I added a SmoothStepper.  I'll be doing low-volume production of a variety of parts for old Jaguar cars.

Regards,
Ray L.

1612

General Mach Discussion / Re: Need Help with power Relay setup for steppers

« on: September 08, 2008, 10:37:17 PM »

The main reason that I want to do this is so the motors are not running (heating up) when I e-stop the machine and walk away from it for any length of time. I guess I could just hook up a switch, but since I had an extra relay I figured that I would use that instead. Couldn't I have the relay delay before the power is cut then the e-stop would not be effected?

Thanks, Tom

The amount of heat the motors generate when idle is a drop in the bucket compared to the heat they generate when running.  Seems like an insignificant optimization.  Steppers do not mind heat....

Regards,
Ray L.

1613

General Mach Discussion / Re: Need Help with power Relay setup for steppers

« on: September 08, 2008, 10:26:13 PM »

I have the probostep. The way that I was going to do this was to run the driver board power through a relay that would cut the power on e-stop. Do you think that doing it that way will cause problems?

Thanks, Tom

Tom,

    I'm curious why you want to do that?  The step pulses will stop, so the axis will stop moving.  Why cut the power?  In fact, it'll stop faster with the power on, since the holding torque of the motors will declerate the machine much faster.  Seems like unnecesary complexity to me....

Regards,
Ray L.

1614

General Mach Discussion / Re: Need Help with power Relay setup for steppers

« on: September 08, 2008, 08:49:51 PM »

I believe you could do that with a simple "brain" function that monitors the E-Stop state, and drives a PP output to control the relay.

Regards,
Ray L.

1615

SmoothStepper USB / SS And Mach3 Kernel Frequency

« on: September 08, 2008, 08:47:38 PM »

I'm assuming that with SS, the kernal frequency setting in Mach no longer matters?  Seems like I saw something somewhere indicating it should just be left at 25kHz, but I can no longer find that reference.

Regards,
Ray L.

1616

SmoothStepper USB / HELP! - Mach3 Starts Up With Axes Moving!!

« on: September 08, 2008, 08:35:32 PM »

I just got my SS today, and it took all of about 10 minutes to get it plugged into my knee mill, get drivers installed, and have everything more or less running.  Pretty impressive!  It's also doubled my rapid speeds.  But, a few problems:
1) When I start Mach3, it comes up with *several* axes moving!  It does not come up in E-Stop mode as it should.  What's up with that?
2) It seems to have rendered my brain-based pendant nearly useless.  It appears to be impossible to reliably perform a very short jog.  A very brief button press is either ignored, or results in a move lasting up to about a second.  Surely this is not expected?  If it is, is there *any* way to have the SS and one or more PPs active at the same time?  Should I disable the Mach3 de-bounce, and only use the SS ones?
3) Related to #2, pendant operation in general seems unreliable.  Sometimes it works OK, sometimes hardly at all.  Never had that problem with the PP.
4) Homing no longer works correctly.  It correctly homes the Y axis, but as soon as it triggers the X home/limit switch, a limit stop is triggered, and the homing operation stops before X is properly homed.  I (and others) have had this problem before with Mach, so it may well be a Mach problem, rather than an SS problem.  This is odd, since I have only one set of home/limit switches, all wired in series, so it sure doesn't smell like a noise problem.  I have all inputs set to 100uS de-bounce.
But, overall, despite these issues, I am very pleased with what I've seen so far!

Regards,
Ray L.

1617

General Mach Discussion / Re: Move X axis on "# of steps" or degrees (?)

« on: September 08, 2008, 04:16:59 PM »

Given that Mach doesn't really care about the units, you can set the steps/unit to 1, and then your commands will simply be in steps.  So, G0 X50 will move 50 steps, or 90 degrees.  You can also set steps/unit to 0.5555556, and then give it commands in degrees.  So, G0 X90 will move 90 * 0.5555556 steps, which is 50 steps or 90 degrees.  Or, just use the A axis, which I think is already in degrees.

Regards,
Ray L.

1618

General Mach Discussion / Re: Fishing for comments on my scientific automation application with a Sherline CNC

« on: September 07, 2008, 04:41:53 PM »

If I'm understanding correctly what you're trying to do, it's quite simple, and you don't even need to get into Visual Basic to do it.  You can use G-code to do the positioning, and insert M00 commands where you need to wait for the machine to decide it's time for the next move.  You can create a smiple "brain" function to monitor the input from your opto, and have it feed an Alt-R keypress into Mach when the opto is asserted, which will then cause the G-code to move past the M00 and execute the next move.

Regards,
Ray L.

1619

General Mach Discussion / Re: Bug, or Feature?

« on: September 06, 2008, 04:50:28 PM »

LOL, well didnt know exactly what you were meaning but got the drift, never heard of the Firesign Theatre, must be a USA thing?
 It is true however and if people think they are never idiots then they are the true idiots

Hood
 

Hood,

   Yeah, I guess it's a US thing.  Firesign Theater was a group of people that did audio comedy skits back in the 60's and 70's.  Very popular with the college crowd at the time ("pharmaceutical enhancement" probably made them even funnier.  Very amusing stuff if you have a properly twisted sense of humor:  http://www.firesigntheatre.com/albums/album.php?album=bozos
   Obviously, you're not in the US.  Where do you live?

Regards,
Ray L.

1620

General Mach Discussion / Re: Bug, or Feature?

« on: September 06, 2008, 04:33:51 PM »

Ah.....  Another child of the '70s....   :-)

Regards,
Ray L.